Formatting margins in Word documents

Question

I am formatting a document written by someone else and am frustrated by the wandering margins. I have tried deleting all the margins and resetting but the problem remains. The ruler at the top of the page also seems to reset at every page. What am I missing ?

Answer 1

In Word, first distinguish between Margins and Indents.

Margins are a Section property and you seldom want to reset margins. Indents are set for each paragraph in a document. These can be left and right indents and are usually what people want to change when they are talking about margins.

Here is my writing on this topic.

The ruler at the top of the page reflects the paragraph formatting for indents and tabs and the section setting for margins. It can be different in every paragraph.

So, having these concepts clear in your mind, unless top and bottom margins are involved, what we are talking about should be paragraph indents. These are ideally set in the styles being applied. That is probably not the case with your task, though.

Try selecting your entire text and with everything selected, organize the indents on the ruler the way you want. These can also be set using the Paragraph Formatting dialog box for more precision.

If section breaks were in fact used to change margins, there are two approaches.

Do either of these with a copy or at least with having a backup.

First approach is to select the entire document and set the margins. This is done on the layout tab. This should handle the margin switches. This was harrymc's suggestion.

The second approach is more drastic and uses the Replace feature to remove all section breaks. Ctrl+H is the keyboard shortcut. Replace ^b with nothing or with ^p. That removes all section breaks and margin changes. Section breaks also carry headers and footers, orientation and columns, so you may have a mess there as well. If this is your situation, write back and we will get into macros to fix.