Margin cursor icon behavior

Question

I'm working in Windows 7, on documents created or edited in Word by someone using a Mac. In her documents--whether she's created a new one or is working in one I created--the cursor changes into a margin icon (2 parallel bars with arrows pointing in opposite directions) at the left-hand margin. When that icon is there, I can't click right at the margin to select or insert text. The cursor lands one character in. It is a small thing but gets quite inefficient when I have to do it over and over. This only happens in her documents and I assume is related to the Mac-to-Windows conversion. I would love to know why this happens and whether there's a way to fix it.

Answer 1

Is this the cursor you see?

If so, the text is in a table. (This has nothing to do with Mac-to-Windows conversion -- it's a standard feature of Word on most platforms.)

Another clue is that, if you click in the text, the Table Tools tab appears on the ribbon. That tab is visible only when the cursor is in a table. To see the table's cells when its borders are turned off, click the Layout sub-tab under Table Tools and then click the View Gridlines button at the left end of the ribbon.

Then you'll see light dashed lines. The place you're trying to click is on the right-side edge of the cell.

As the arrows on the cursor indicate, you can click there and drag the edge of the column to the left or right, making the table narrower or wider. What you cannot do is insert text there -- you must click in the text inside the cell to do that.

Answer 2

It sometimes helps to turn on Table Gridlines to reveal the object, or to switch to Draft View.

I did both. Alas, all I saw when I turned on gridlines was the ordinary gridlines you see for a page of text. No table visible. Draft didn't show anything either.

My client who sends these files is practically computer illiterate. There is no way to find out what she may be doing to these files. I've received other files from Word for Mac with no problem. I guess I just have to live with it.

Thanks anyway!

Answer 3

Hi Maven:

There is no conversion going from Word Mac to Word PC.  I do it constantly.  Mac Word uses the PC Word file format: they are not simply compatible, they are exactly the same.

I suggest that you have a hidden object there sitting on the margin.  Quite possibly a borderless table.  It may be a graphics object such as a text box, or some weird artefact in a picture bullet.

It sometimes helps to turn on Table Gridlines to reveal the object, or to switch to Draft View.

This is something the author is doing: Mac Word has a range of inappropriate behaviours, but this is not one of them.

Hope this helps

Answer 4

Yes, that's the cursor I'm seeing.

I'm familiar with tables, and what you say makes sense except that as far as I can tell there is no table in the document. When I click in the text no table tab appears.

I tried to take a screen shot but the cursor doesn't show in the result. If I hold down the mouse button when this cursor appears, the horizontal ruler at the top pops up, and the vertical dotted line appears that allows me to move the page margin. But I don't want to move the margin--I want to get rid of this cursor.

Any other ideas?