Word 2007 Phantom Header Line Spacing

[L Sangree]

Using Windows XP; Office / Word 2007, but saving all documents in
compatibility mode

Four users are all reporting the same problem which occurs at random while
they are working in documents with headers. While they are typing in or
simply viewing the body of the document, they may notice that the text jumps
down. If they scroll up so they can see the header, it seems that the two
line header has become double-spaced or that a blank line has been inserted
between the two text lines. The space disappears as soon as they click in the
header, but it will print out if they do not click in the header.

I have checked the paragraph properties of the header. The spacing before
and after is 0 points and the line spacing is single. I have displayed all
the non-printing characters. I see paragraph marks at the end of each line
and tab marks on the second line between the left justified text and the page
number at the right. On the Page Layout tab, the vertical alignment is set to
top.

Any other ideas? I cannot create this problem on demand as it seems to
happen only randomly, but in many different documents, but at least we could
tweak some settings and wait to see what happens.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Have you installed SP2?

 

[L Sangree]

I installed SP2 last week after your reply, but I don't use headers that
much! SP2 didn't cause any problems for me, so one of the people who does use
headers installed it yesterday. We'll monitor for a while to see if the
header problem seems to go away. So hard to know for sure since it can't be
duplicated on demand. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[L Sangree]

The header problem just occurred again for the user with SP2 installed. Any
other ideas?

 

[Terry Farrell]

Try the Open and Repair option as I suspect that there must be a minor
corruption in the document or its template.

Terry

The header problem just occurred again for the user with SP2 installed.
Any
other ideas?

 

[L Sangree]

Should all users use Open and Repair on all documents with headers? This is
affecting all four of them on many documents.

Try the Open and Repair option as I suspect that there must be a minor
corruption in the document or its template.

Terry

 

[Terry Farrell]

Nope, not if four users have this problem. It makes me more convinced that
this is a problem with the template. So check the template for corruptions.
Also, are they opening new documents from the template installed in a
workgroup folder that they all share? Is the template locked against
accidental editing by one of them?

Terry

 

[L Sangree]

Before I read your post my guinea pig user did "Open and Repair" on all the
documents in her folder for her current project. No difference.

Next she renamed her normal.dotm and started with a new one. Not only did
that not solve the header problem, but it made it harder to fix! With the old
normal.dotm any time the extra line appeared in the header she could just
click in the header area and the line went away. With a new normal.dotm, the
extra line still appeared but became permanent until removed. (She followed
steps in Article ID: 918429 to do this.)

Her normal.dotm is on her own C: drive but documents are all stored on the
server.

Everyone starts from the same sample document .doc file which is stored on
the server in a folder everyone can read. (I don't want to say template since
that is a more specific Word term for a dotm file.) When someone starts a new
project, he makes a new folder under his own main folder on the server. He
copies the sample to the new folder and makes changes in that copy.

Article ID: 918429 has other suggestions, but they seem to deal mostly with
a single corrupted document and I think my problem is more widespread. My
users are even using a couple of different printers, so I don't think the
driver is an issue. Do you think I should try that?

Laura

 

[Terry Farrell]

You should not copy a document to start a new document: templates are what
should be used. Place the templates in a single folder on the server and
then on each users' PC, set the File Locations Workgroup template option to
point to that location. Now when the user go File | New, they will see the
template listed: double-click to open a new document based on the template.

The problem you are experiencing suggests that you have a conflict of styles
between the document (presumably originally based on normal.dot) and the
users' own normal.dots. If you use a template on the server, the documents
created from the template will keep a mutual attachment to that template and
there won't be any conflict with the normal.dot on a user's PC.

Terry

 

[L Sangree]

I will have to read up more on templates. We have 50+ page documents with
10-20 links to Excel. Can that really be replaced with a template?

If "the documents created from the template will keep a mutual attachment to
that template " and the template is on the server, what happens when the user
is working with offline files on his laptop and not connected to the server?

The source or sample document is frequently updated but we would not want
those updates to affect a document that is already "in progress". I don't
think changes to text in a template affect existing documents that are based
on it, but I want to confirm that.

We have close to 200 sample/source/boilerplate documents. Changing them all
to templates would be quite an undertaking. I assume we would have to strip
out all formatting and reformat so we aren't just carrying the problem
forward.