Page Breaks in Word 2013 invisible and change formatting

I'm having the same problem ever since I moved from 2007 to 2013.  It's infuriating!  Like you, I work in draft mode most of the time.  I cannot fathom why Microsoft made the decision to hide manual page breaks like this.

I found this article which spells out the problem and the solution quite nicely.

http://wordribbon.tips.net/T010621\_Missing\_Page\_Break\_Indicator.html

Here's my distillation:

There are two problems with manual page breaks in Word 2013.

PROBLEM #1.  The paragraph mark

Every time you insert a manual page break, it places that page break in its own paragraph.

As such, the page break indicator does not extend all the way across the screen.  If you are in draft mode, and you Show Formatting Symbols, it looks like this:

-----------Page Break------------P

This would be of little concern, if not for the much bigger problem:  In draft mode, unless you Show Formatting Symbols, such page breaks are INVISIBLE.

SOLUTION:  After inserting the manual page break, make sure you have at least one line of text immediately after the break.  Then place the cursor at the beginning of that line, and press the Backspace key.  This deletes the paragraph mark at the end of the page break, and it will appear as it has in past versions of Word.

PROBLEM #2.  Paragraph formatting

If you insert a page break using the ribbon's Page Layout tab, the paragraph formatting remains unchanged.  But if you insert it with the Ctrl-Enter keyboard shortcut, or with the Ribbon's Insert tab, the paragraph spacing is "8pt after", which seems arbitrary, and it really messes up your document.

SOLUTION:  Insert page breaks using the ribbon's Page Layout tab.

OR

Fix the paragraph formatting right away (I use the format painter) before it spreads like a weed.

A hard page break always takes on the formatting of the paragraph in which the selection is located when the page break is inserted.  As far as I can see, the behaviour in Word 2013 is unchanged from that of earlier versions.

I guess by a long page break marker you mean the one that extends to the right margin as they did in Word 2003.  Beginning with Word 2007, a hard page break marker is only about two inches long.

Unless you are working with a document that contains a lot of graphics, I cannot imagine working in Draft Mode (or without non-printing marks being shown).

I am bringing this up now because we use CCH Engagement and they tell me that we MUST use the latest Word and Excel format. Because of the page break issue, we were saving our documents as .doc format all these years and through all these Office updates. We were unable to use them as .docx format regardless of how long the page break has been an issue because when we paste linked in spreadsheets into our Word document, it always cut off columns of numbers. If we put back in the paste link, the problem reappeared when we open the document again.  Fortunately, the column disappearing issue has been fixed, but sadly the page break has not and as you say won't be.

I cannot replicate the issue that you have with typing after using Ctrl+Enter in a new document.

As the appearance issue changed in Word 2007 and in spite of my presence in these forums on an almost continual basis since that time, your post is the first one that I have come across that raises that issue, and also that there have been two subsequent versions released, I would be very surprised if the behaviour will be changed.

Yes, in Word 2003 the page breaks were always visible in draft view. However, in Word 2013, sections breaks are visible in draft view without show/hide being turned on and page breaks are not.  We use both in our documents, so it is frustrating that we are forced to use show/hide at all times if we want to see our page breaks.  

Also, the two inch long page breaks have been known to change our formatting to left aligned without noticing that it has done that.  If we start a new document and put in a page break using "control enter" and start typing right after the page break, the document will be left aligned and 8 pt. after each line of text even though we have modified our "normal style" to be Helvetica, 12 pt., justify, 0 pt. spacing after in the paragraph indent section.  

Even though we don't use a lot of graphics, I can't imagine having to work with show/hide always on just because we can't see our page breaks. Sometimes, we want to see the clean document without showing nonprinting characters, while still being able to see where our page breaks and section breaks are located. 

A break, whether section break or page break, should have the same view. It makes no sense why section breaks are visible, while page breaks are not. 

I gather from what you are telling me that Microsoft won't be fixing this problem then?