MS Word formatting concerns

January 15, 2008

The same discussion for ’standardizing’ on MS Office came up yesterday (again).  The big issue is that going between OpenOffice and MS Word will sometimes lose certain formatting.  However, I’ve also heard of (and seen) MS Word losing formatting with itself.  A bit of digging turns up this little nugget:

Printer hardware and configuration can affect the appearance of document output both to the screen and to the printer. The print layout of a file depends on the fonts, graphics, images, and configuration of the printer hardware. Printing between different brands or models of printers commonly results in slightly different output, which can cause different page breaks, margin changes, and color differences. When you format a large document with default printer settings set to a specific printer, you should use that same printer so that you reduce the possibility of unwanted page breaks or margin changes. (source)

While the formatting losses may not be as great as the OOo->MSO differences, it’s still something to be aware of.  I’ve seen people struggle with this one on occasion, and really have no idea why things ‘look different’ between home and work, even though both sides are using “MS Word”.  Something to be aware of, certainly.  I know I learned this years ago, but had shelved it away mentally, and it came up again yesterday.

BTW, for everyone out there using *any* word processing system, please take the time to learn and understand and use the ’style’ support of your system.  I don’t particularly care what you use, but being able to make global formatting and appearance changes is vastly easier when all the text has various defined styles (’header 2′, ‘body text’, etc.) as opposed to ad-hoc visual effects (bold, italics, etc.) applied directly to specific characters on the screen.

Posted in Microsoft, Personal