Margins change between desktop and mobile

Doug, thank you. So, if I put a saddle intended for an elephant on a horse, the saddle will adjust itself automatically to the new beast? I think a better analogy to describe this situation is that I take a saddle from one horse, put it on another horse of the same size and in the process of moving from one to the other the saddle has changed size. I am a certified Java programmer, an ex-Systems Analyst and also an ex-IT salesman (ATM backbone networks).

And, no, If you send a resume to someone in simple image-style PDF (there are different types of PDF ranging from simple image to fully available text), depending on the version you send the ATS will recognise it or not at all with different parsing results in between - and don't gorget that there are different qualities of ATS on the market ranging from almost pointless to minutely intelligent. I'd much rather just send a doc or docx format and know that they are the best-parsed formats - I even found to my chagrin that the ODT format don't always work well with ATSs, no matter what they say.

Once again, here's another scenario (which I have encountered). I send my resume for a role. Later on I'm talking to someone and it transpires that the same resume would be of interest to them; I whip out my smartphone, open the document and share it by email or whatever method we agree on; the result is that they receive a document which does not look like the one I painstakingly produced. So, to repeat, do you recommend that every singe Word document I produce should be automatically saved in PDF format also, just in case, and even if I do that does it get through the ATS so that a recruiter will even deign to read half of it?

I can tell you the workaround I have adopted for now - never open a document from SkyDrive on my Smartphone to send it - just promise to send it later.

As you can see, the much-touted collaboration which Microsoft markets with Office everywhere (smartphone, tablet, desktop, etc) can not work if the documents are changed surreptitiously when opened depending on the device used.

You can also see that I have a workaround - I made my original post to see whether I was missing something, and in the event that this is a genuine bug then it should be brought to the attention of users and developers alike for their respective priorities. I would have preferred that I had missed something

You missed the point of my analogy.  The saddle would not adjust itself to the new beast.  And that's the way it is with Word on different platforms.

Going back to an issue in your original post, was there any text in the header that appeared on the Android device, or was there merely an empty paragraph in the header pane?

I gather that by ATS you are referring to Applicant Tracking Systems.  At my age, I need no longer be bothered with such things and they were unheard of in my days of job hunting, which pre-dated computers, or at least the use of them in the business world.

Doug, I understand your analogy a bit better, I think. I agree that there is a difference between the two, and that I really wonder at the feasibility of wanting to work on a document on 4.7" screen. I personally have a preference for using my desktop/laptop for work and mobile devices for occasionally reading the document and, as in this case, sending (I love the idea of being able to open a document on my phone, change a word or even not, and quickly send it to someone, all while I'm waiting for a train/plane/automobile.

As for the issue, there didn't appear to be anything in the header. I assure you that this header did not exist in the original document and suddenly appeared when I opened it on my phone. Originally I wondered why the document had gone from 2 pages 2 pages plus about 10 lines (you can imagine my shock and frustration after the work it took me to reduce 25 years of career onto 2 pages) - was it the margins? it looked like it and I could even imagine Word doing something weird like applying a default margin setting (a bug, but it can happen). But I saved the "new" version and examined it on my computer - a header had been inserted. I looked at the phone again (without closing/reopening), found the header/footer tools and was able to remove this phantom header, resulting in a document very close to the original except that one line had moved from page 2 to page 1.

To be clear, I know bugs can exist and even though they bug (sorry) me, I can live with it. But adding a header? That takes things to a new level of surrealism.

Yes, I'm talking about Applicant Tracking System. You're lucky you're past that. It's the first time I've had to deal with these and I'm am really disappointed about the quality of these systems, the power they have without doing very much and the fact that they essentially only exist to allow consultants to drink a coffee instead of read CVs. I started my professional life as a systems analyst in the 80s and have seen things progress, generally in a positive direction and fairly predictably, but these ATSs are truly surprising.

On Fri, 2 Oct 2015 22:37:50 +0000, Doug Robbins - Word MVP [MVP]
wrote:

An if you are going to be sending documents to people who do not require to edit them, then yes, the best way to ensure that the recipients see the document in the way that you intend is to send it as PDF.

Or, perhaps even better, if formatting is not an issue, as a text
file.

When you start a new document, you will not see anything in the Header

However, there is always an empty paragraph in the Header (and footer) of the document

If in your "carefully crafted" document, you had the top or bottom margins set to be less than the distance specified for the Header (or Footer) from the edge of the page, under some circumstances, your margin settings will be over-ridden by the Header and Footer settings from the edge of the page.

If you are going to set the margins to values that are less than the default distance of the Header or Footer from the edge of the page, you need to reduce that distance so that it does not affect the margin.