Margins change between desktop and mobile

Anonymous
2015-10-01T18:01:52+00:00

I have taken a while to carefully sculpt an important document on desktop (my resume in fact). It took me a long time to squeeze it all onto 2 pages, adjusting the top and bottom margins, fonts, etc, to make it happen.

The strange thing is that when I look at the document on Office for Mobile (Android, Nexus 4 phone, Android 5.1.1), it overflows onto a third page and the margins look wrong, as if they are the default setting. When I save as a new document, the changes ae kept in the new document without me doing anything to insert them.

What I'm worrying about, apart from the fact that their is a format change between devices, is that if I open a document on mobile which made on desktop and then share it, I will be sending an unfaithful copy. Furthermore, it will definitely cause problems when people collaborate.

Having taken a couple of minutes to check before posting, I noticed that the new document saved on Android actually had a header inserted (I don't know why that would happen). When I remove the header, the document is now on 2 pages, but there has been a slight change (line 1 of page 2 has moved up to the bottom of page 1). I've checked - you can remove headers in Word for Android (painful but possible) but it has the same line-shift as I found on desktop.

Please, does anyone know how I can avoid Word for Android changing my document?

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  1. Stefan Blom 353K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-10-01T22:36:02+00:00

    Formatting will vary between devices, because Word depends a lot on the current printer when creating the page layout. (Normally, the variations should be small, but there are cases when there might be bigger differences.)

    To ensure that future employees see the same version of a document, convert it to PDF before sending it to them.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-10-02T08:05:36+00:00

    Thank you, Stefan, but I don't think this is the issue.

    à) Why would the current printer cause a header to be inserted? Page size and margins, perhaps, but inserting elements? It would be a bug if elements were actually added.

    b) Microsoft Office is no all about collaboration - one of the major improvements touted by Microsoft for version 2016 is improved collaboration. Converting to PDF before send is contrary to the intended use of Office as a collaborative tool (as an MVP, please explain how the review system works if we collaborate between each share, which in any case eliminates the possibility of real-time collaboration).

    In any case, converting to PDF doesn't help - see the following workflow:

    I create document on desktop, store it on Skydrive, meet someone, open document during conversation on phone, discover document has changed before I can convert to PDF.

    Any other ideas?

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  3. Stefan Blom 353K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-10-02T08:54:43+00:00

    I agree that headers shouldn't be removed or added depending on the device you are using. But are you sure that the header is actually missing? Note that not all views display headers and footers. In desktop versions of Word you can choose Draft view which hides most of the layout, including headers and footers as well as many graphics.

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  4. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-10-02T09:30:45+00:00

    Make sure that on both computers, under File>Options>Display, there is a check mark in the box for "Show white space between pages in Print Layout view".

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-10-02T09:58:23+00:00

    Thanks, Stefan. In fact, when I originally did the document on desktop, I had to make sure that I removed the header and footer otherwise it just wouldn't fit on 2 pages - I also had to reduce the top and bottom margins - so it's clear that there was no header in the original document. Yesterday, while typing the OP I thought of the header question, that's why I went back to check on the phone before posting, and, lo and behold, there was a header in the document I had just opened without editing  on my phone.

    I hardly ever use draft view because in everyday use I find no use for it - I prefer to do my documents in WYSIWYG, and I only use other views when I'm looking for a formatting issue.

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