Gutters. What's the point?

[John]

Some features seem to persist from version to version of Word. One such
"feature" is the ability to set gutters for a document on the Page Setup,
Margins tab. As I understand it this option is there as a quick fix for users
who decide to bind their document and find that they haven't allowed enough
space in the margin to handle the dead space which the binding method
creates.

However, has anyone tried using this feature in practice? I created a
document with a left, right, top and bottom margin of 2.5cm. I also created a
header and specified it should start 1cm from the top of the page.

I then decided to add a gutter of 0.5cm to the left of the page. This
resulted in an effective left margin of 3cm. So far so good, although I'm not
sure why you can't just increase the value of the left margin itself to 3cm?
Both the header and the body text observed this change.

I then decided to change the gutter so that it appeared at the top of the
page instead. The body text dutifully moved down the page by 0.5cm. However
the header stayed at its specified position of 1cm from the top of the page.
Doesn't this behaviour mean that top gutters are pointless if you have
documents with headers?

If the option to set gutter and gutter position didn't exist would we
actually lose any flexibility? Can't the same thing be achieved by simply
changing the margins and the start position of the header?

As a general point adding a gutter to a document after it has been formated
is not necessarily a good idea since it reduces the amount of space available
for text and can therefore completely ruin the layout of the document.

I looked through quite a few books on Word before posting this question, but
none of them gave an example of where using gutters would be a good idea.

Does anyone here use gutters and if so did they solve a problem which
couldn't have been tackled in any other way? I would venture that most people
leave the gutter value at 0cm, so I'm curious as to why it persists between
versions. Hopefully someone on this board will be able to defend its
inclusion.

Regards,

J.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I am entirely with you. I always figured the gutter setting was a crutch for
people whose arithmetic skills are so poor that they can't add the desired
gutter to their Left or Inside margin. One instance where it does become
useful is described at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/BookletPrinting.htm. In this case, the
article was greatly simplified when it occurred to me to tell people just to
set an Inside gutter equal to half the page width and then set margins as
desired. Many users seemed to have a conceptual problem visualizing the
desired result and figuring out how to add half the page width to the
desired page margin to get the resulting Inside margin for the sheet.

Wrt a gutter at the top, the header issue hadn't occurred to me (since I've
never tried this), but a common problem is that there's no way to set an
appropriate gutter for landscape pages in a predominantly portrait document
(if you set the gutter to Left or Inside, you get it at the side of the
portrait pages instead of the top or bottom). The workaround here is to use
"Different odd and even" header/footer and add Space Before to the header on
odd pages and Space After to the footer on even pages to create the gutter.

 

[John]

Thanks for the great reply Suzanne. You certainly know your stuff.

As much as I like Word I still don't think it's a match for the old Ventura
Publisher program I used to use about 12 years ago (particularly where more
complicated documents are concerned). It's both a shame and surprising that
Word hasn't caught up with these old desktop publishing programs yet. I still
find the Word interface unnecessarily cluttered and it can sometimes be very
difficult to place items exactly on the page where you want them to be, since
Word always seems to assume it knows best.

I'm still not convinced by the ribbon interface either. It may be great for
users who don't want to learn the program properly but I find it quite slow
when you want to take control and define elements yourself rather than just
using all the pre-defined stuff.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Well, Word is not and has never pretended to be a desktop publishing
application (Publisher fills that slot in the Microsoft Office lineup, to
the extent that anything does). It is a word processing program, pure and
simple. Although it has many features that make it superior to some DTP apps
for specific jobs (such as long documents with footnotes/endnotes, TOCs,
indexes, etc.), its graphics handling and page layout capabilities will
never rival PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, QuarkXpress, Adobe InDesign, etc.

 

[Bear]

Sorry to hijack your thread a little, but I used to think that Word was
pretty amazing. It's not a desktop publishing tool, but it's darned near
everything else for everyone else.

I used to be able to defend Word for tech pubs on the strength of two
arguments:

It's ubiquitous and eternal.
It's fully extensible.

Now it looks like MS has neatly lopped off my second argument.

Sigh.

Bear