0

My customer and I use Office 365. All the old contract documents (*.doc) of his were made with various previous Word versions and carefully taylored to fit on one page. When he now opens the old documents 4-5 paragraphs are wrapped to page 2. Thus the original document cannot be reproduced.

It looks like the line spacing is too big.

Strange though: on two of my computers everything looks good.

I think I ruled out the following points but none did help:

  • the font is installed on both machines (Lucida Sans Unicode / 8.5 pt.)
  • All Settings in Word-Options -> Extended -> Layout options and Compatibility options are identical (and were not changed beforehand)
  • I installed the same printer driver on both machines (MIcrosoft PS Class Driver) because I know that printer drivers used to influence the layout
  • I transferred my normal.dotm to his PC.

See below screenshots to give you an idea. Any help is greatly appreciated!

this is correct: formatted correctly

this is not (2 pages) formatted incorrectly 1/2 formatted incorrectly 2/2

Wolfgang Jacques
  • 143
  • 6
  • If you hold the first page of each on top of each other and look "through" them to a bright light, do the words on each line match and it is the vertical spacing that is wrong, or are the words off left-to-right as well? – ivanivan Aug 19 '19 at 21:49
  • Also, this looks like a order form/purchase order type thing. Is it standard enough you could make it a fillable PDF ? – ivanivan Aug 19 '19 at 21:52
  • Try opening the document in free LibreOffice Writer. It is surprisingly better able to open different versions of MS Word docs than can any one particular version of Word. – DrMoishe Pippik Aug 20 '19 at 04:15
  • @ivanivan it seems to affect the line spacing _only_. The words on each line match. I will prepare a new document template with proper & modern formatting for the client, but the problem with the old contracts persists. So PDF is not an option here. – Wolfgang Jacques Aug 20 '19 at 08:28
  • 1
    There may be some compatibility issues between different versions of Office. For more information, refer to [Compatibility changes between versions](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compatibility-changes-between-versions-692289af-b760-4698-8326-14b2edcd6552). Were the documents opened under Compatibility Mode? Generally, compatibility mode preserves the layout of the document. If you convert the document to modern mode, there may be some layout differences. If you don't work with older versions of Word, I suggest you use the new version of the format (such as .docx). – Herb Gu _ MSFT Aug 20 '19 at 09:33
  • If it is simply the line spacing, I think you can control that under the page or paragraph formatting, may be worth trying to reduce it a little bit and see if you can get things back onto one page. – ivanivan Aug 20 '19 at 12:39
  • Thank you @all, the case is dismissed. No solution found, I am doing some manual work now and move on. – Wolfgang Jacques Aug 21 '19 at 15:36

1 Answers1

0

The case is dismissed. No solution found, I am doing some manual work now and move on. It must have something to do with line spacing handling and the font (Lucida Sans Unicode 8.5) and Word formatting is crap anyway :/

I blame the customer for not working correctly over the last 10 years ;)

Wolfgang Jacques
  • 143
  • 6