Word 2004 to Word X Loss of Formatting

[MJB]

Sorry for the message It¹s just that I didn¹t see my problem in any of
the other messages. Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing formatting
problems when opening a document created and saved in Word 2004, but opened
in Word X?

I have a number of machines on a network, some machines have Office 2004
other machines have Office X. The Office X copies have all the latest
updates. When I open a document in X that was created in 2004, the
formatting of the paragraphs are off by an average of two lines.

Anyone else experience this problem? If so, what is the fix?

Thanks MJB

 

[Elliott Roper]

Sorry for the message It¹s just that I didn¹t see my problem in any of
the other messages. Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing formatting
problems when opening a document created and saved in Word 2004, but opened
in Word X?

I have a number of machines on a network, some machines have Office 2004
other machines have Office X. The Office X copies have all the latest
updates. When I open a document in X that was created in 2004, the
formatting of the paragraphs are off by an average of two lines.

Anyone else experience this problem? If so, what is the fix?

Learn to live with it. Screwing up paragraphs and pages is what Word
does best. ;-)
Well, think of consistent pagination and consistent linebreaks as a
non-goal of Word. Those decisions are left to the moment of printing.
The printing is left to Apple, the printer drivers and the fonts
installed on each machine and even the resident fonts in the printer.

2004 uses a newer display facility in OS X. 2004 uses Unicode fonts
(often with the same name as the older ones) that may have different
width tables.

So your 2004 to v.X and back is now as hit and miss as dealing with the
same Word document on Mac and PC. I have worked on documents where the
last page number changes by more than 30 when moved from one to the
other.

You can drive yourself nuts trying to keep that under tight control. It
is like herding cats. My solution is to use a few tricks to keep things
roughly right and to give up the rest before I lose my remaining hair.

1. Generous page margins in all templates. (That stops printers
interfering too much)
2. Consistent styles. Don't apply ad-hoc formatting, and limit your
font selections to the 'popular' ones.
3. Intelligent use of 'keep with next' and 'keep lines together'. You
will waste a bit of paper here and there but by giving Word much
stronger hints about good places to break pages, the differences
between paragraphs won't propagate across pages nearly as often.

There might be something going especially wrong at your site. Two extra
lines per paragraph sounds like a very big difference, unless you write
very long paragraphs. Try a few experiments, such as changing the fonts
on both.

As a check of what I just wrote, I opened the same document written by
somebody else on a PC, as read-only in both 2004 and v.X. Each broke
lines in quite different places. In general 2004 was tighter, quite
often getting an extra paragraph on a page. He had not used my tricks 1
& 3, although his styles were consistent and all TNR fonts, so v.X made
it a 14 page document and 2004 scrunched it into 12. That is not as bad
as it sounds, because he had some evil section and hard page breaks
that made it look worse than it was. After losing the hard page breaks
and applying trick 3, they came out at 13 and 14 pages. Had I taken the
time to bring the margins in, and been a little more vicious with keep
with next, they would have both shown 14 with the automatic page breaks
lining up on eveery page.

Even though I had 'use printer metrics' set in both v.X and 2004, v.X's
attempt to display in page layout mode was as pathetic as I remembered
it. Some words were so close together, I had to count keystrokes to
confirm there was a space between them. It prints OK though.

 

[Plan B Solutions]

Elliott, Thanks for all of your suggestions

 

[Clive Huggan]

If you would like more ideas on formatting as Elliott suggested, download
"Bend Word to Your Will" from the Word MVPs' website
(http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/Bend/BendWord.htm) and read Appendix A:
'The main ³minimum maintenance² features of my documents'.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
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[Matt Centurión [MSFT]]

Sorry for the message It¹s just that I didn¹t see my problem in any of the
other messages. Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing formatting
problems when opening a document created and saved in Word 2004, but opened in
Word X?

I have a number of machines on a network, some machines have Office 2004
other machines have Office X. The Office X copies have all the latest updates.
When I open a document in X that was created in 2004, the formatting of the
paragraphs are off by an average of two lines.

Anyone else experience this problem? If so, what is the fix?

Thanks MJB

Word X-->2004 should not look all that different. Another possibility apart
from what Elliot suggested is to make sure not font substitutions are
present (check Word | Preferences | Compatibility | Font Subsitution...). If
any of the aforementioned solutions don¹t work and the document looks vastly
different then send me a copy as we¹d like to check it out.

Thanks,

Matt
MacWord Testing
Microsoft

 

[Elliott Roper]

Word X-->2004 should not look all that different. Another possibility apart
from what Elliot suggested is to make sure not font substitutions are
present (check Word | Preferences | Compatibility | Font Subsitution...).

Well spotted Matt. That would cause what he was seeing. I'm mortified I
never thought of that myself.

In the tests I did, there was a surprising difference between v.X and
2004. I think I might have a small font problem of my own. ;-) I think
I might have have spent so long getting them right I might have made it
worse. Like Bernaise sauce. Can fonts go lumpy if cooked too long?

v.X has always looked awful on screen here, with sometimes bizarre
interword spacing, especially in the comments when displayed at the
bottom of the screen. Whatever else is wrong with the reviewing pane in
2004 - and there is plenty - at least the type is better.