Word 2003 odd page break behavior

[JohnM]

Apparently out of the blue, Word is suddenly acting strangley. When working
on a document with a number of paragraphs on a single page, if typing at the
bottom of the page, rather than creating a page break and displaying a new
page, all the text typed below the first page appears to disappear.
However, if the cursor is moved to the bottom of the first page and a hard
page break is inserted, a new page is displayed below the page break and all
the text that was typed below the original first page magically reappears on
the new page.

The only change to the system is that a label printer was added a week or so
ago. Is this an issue with a page size? Has anyone seen this behavior
before? Is there a known solution to this problem?

Thanks for any help.
- John

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The most common cause of this is that Word sort of thinks there's more than
one column and Column 1 is margin width, so all the rest of the text is
compressed into a Column 2 that has no width. The fix is to go to Format |
Columns and click on the preview picture for One, which checks the "Equal
column width" box, which otherwise is inaccessible when a single column is
selected. Then click OK.