SOLVED: Word ignores all paper size settings when printing

Every time I go to print my Word documents on Letter size paper, they always print as if on A4 paper. This didn't seem to be a problem for anything other than Word. All other documents, e.g. PDFs and documents printed from my internet browser all print normally on Letter paper as intended with no scaling to A4.

My Word documents are always made on Letter size paper. When I would go to print, the print settings in Word would say the page size is Letter. For some reason when I would open "Printer Properties" from Word, The "Size is:" field in the Paper/Quality options was always blank, and even when I would manually set it to "Letter", press OK, and then print - my document would still end up printing as if on A4 paper.

Most resources online say to fix similar problems like this by changing the printer's Printing Defaults settings. If I went to Start Menu --> Printers & Scanners --> and opened the Printer Properties for my printer, the Printing Defaults settings as accessed through the Advanced tab always showed that the printer was actually set up to use Letter size paper by default. Despite this, for some reason it would also only say that the "Paper available" in the General tab was always A4, and I could not change the "Paper available" to actually show Letter size paper like what the printer was configured for.

Again, this discrepancy between the printer's default size and "paper available" size didn't seem to be a problem for anything other than Word. All other documents printed normally on Letter paper as intended with no scaling to A4. But I figured out how to fix it so Word would cooperate!

THE SOLUTION I found to get Word to cooperate and actually print my paper normally is as follows:

1. In Word, go to File --> Options
2. Go to the Advanced section and scroll down to the "Print" section
3. DESELECT the "Scale content for A4 or 8.5 x 11" paper sizes" check box

After I tried that, my Word document printed properly on Letter paper! I don't know if this is a common issue that other people are having, but I couldn't find anything online about it, so I figured I would share what worked for me in case anyone else finds themselves in this bizarre, niche situation with their printer and Word.