Peculiar Ruler in Word

[Peter Rooney]

My wife has just emailed me a Word document that is SUPPOSED to be set up for
A4, but the ruler across the top of the document shows 0-54 cm
I can't get this to go back to the normal A4 ruler which would show 21 (or
29.7 if landscape).
If I close the doc an restart Word, the ruler STILL shows the wrong
measurement, so obviously some default or other has been changed.
Can anyone offer any advice as to how i can get it back to the correct A4
ruler?
Thanks in advance
Pete

 

[Graham Mayor]

See http://www.gmayor.com/Character_Units.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Peter Rooney]

Graham,

No luck, I'm afraid.
The ruler still shows -3 to 18.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong.
Even when I restart Word, the print view shows a piece of paper that's
almost square - not A4 at all!

Pete

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Two possible issues:

1. The document contains tracked changes or comments and Word is expanding
the margin to allow for the "balloons."

2. You have white space hidden; see
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/WhiteSpace.htm.

From your description, (1) seems more likely.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

And perhaps the ruler/grid origin has been disturbed somehow?

 

[CyberTaz]

To tell you the truth, my money's on #2...

-3 to 0 cm is left edge to left margin = 3 cm
0 to 18 cm is left margin to rt edge = 18 cm
18 cm + 3 cm = the 21 cm he's looking for, and the page looks "almost
square" because the white space is hidden (21 cm X 25 cm displayed).

 

[Harry Simonton]

Graham, your solution worked for me like clockwork. Thanks!

 

[Peter Rooney]

Good morning, all!
Post Easter weekend update:

At home, I uninstalled and reinstalled Office (Publisher is unaffected by
this problem - starts with a normal looking A4 document) but to no avail.

The worrying thing is that since I opened the document in Word at work,
THAT's corrupted too! At the moment, the ruler shows a left hand margin from
-1 to 0, then the ruler running from 0 to 19 and the right hand margin
running from 19 to 20. the length of the page is the same, giving the page a
roughly square appearance.

Just wondering if some nasty piece of hidden VBA has corrupted the registry
in some way and now it's corrupted my settings too.

Does anyone have any idea as to if and where the paper size for Word is
stored in the registry, so i can at least go and check if the settings are
correct?

All I want is for Word to open with a nice A4 sized document!

Yours in desperation

Pete

 

[Peter Rooney]

Oops.
I stand corrected - it WAS the white space issue.
Feeling a bit foolish, but thank you all for solving this.
Not sure why I couldn't make it work last weekm but have just done now, but
there you go.
Thanks again
Pete