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Formatting issue upon printing in word

Anonymous
2023-08-31T11:58:40+00:00

I am really fed up with this weird interaction between the text editor and the internal print function. I make a word document as seen here : Screenhots

SS1 is the texteditor while the second picture is the print preview. notice that the grey titles completly change shape/location

Basically i added tables to make the titles pop out more, they are all on their correct position, but whenever i press print and look at the preview these jump around to seemingly random locations. I just can't find a solution to this and it makes it impossible for me to create bigger files with this layout, because the more of these their are the more i have to offset them to get a good looking final result. This results to a unworkable word file where everything is just scrambled.

If someone knows a work around, around this i would be very thankful

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. John Korchok 231.6K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2023-08-31T15:00:02+00:00

    All your pages elements are floating and are anchored to paragraph marks. Then you've used many paragraph marks in sequence to create a new page. That's a recipe for a formatting disaster, as a slight change to the font rendering by your printer driver can cause a paragraph mark to shift from page 1 to page 2, carrying with it items that are anchored to it, like the table that moves from page 1 to 2.

    To create a new page, use a Page Break instead of multiple returns.

    You could solve this in 2 different ways:

    • Change your tables and graphics to be inline with text, then delete all the extra paragraph marks, or
    • Delete the extra returns and insert page breaks. Enable the display of anchors with File>Options>Display>Show All formatting marks, then drag all anchors to the page break.

    Either method will ensure that the items on a particular page stay on that page.

    5 people found this answer helpful.
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  2. John Korchok 231.6K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-01-02T15:39:57+00:00

    Please start a new thread, including information about your operating system and Word version. You can post screen shots of your formatting problem using the Insert image tool:

    2 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2023-09-02T16:57:57+00:00

    Thank you for your reply, I tried the page break method and this seems to fix the layout, it looks like the correct way to use word actually. I have been using the mutliple keypresses of the enter key for so long that i never questioned this method.

    Well i learned something new, thank you very much!

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  4. Suzanne S Barnhill 277.2K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2023-09-02T13:15:17+00:00

    SS1 = first screen shot.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  5. Stefan Blom 339.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2023-09-02T08:37:01+00:00

    I am not familiar with SS1, but if you are saying that a third-party application is generating Word documents for you, then the end result will often be less than perfect.

    As John noted, floating objects such as text objects and shapes are not the most convenient way to lay out the pages in Word.

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