why do word documents open with wide grey borders

When sharing finished documents with others, use PDF. If you do need to exchange a document such that others can edit and make changes to it, Word’s “.doc” and “.docx” formats are what you need just don’t expect the document to look the same everywhere. Consider it a display-only format - not unlike the paper it’s intended to replace. Depending on the document, it can be, to some limited extent, but that’s not its purpose at all. PDF is not a format designed to be edited. The resulting PDF file can be viewed anywhere with a PDF reader and should look, and even print, exactly the same as your original PDF.

PDF creation acts like a printer - but a printer that’s the same everywhere. The interface used to save as PDF often looks very much like an interface you use to print the document. PDF, which stands for “Portable Document Format”, is designed to display exactly the same everywhere, even across different operating systems, no matter what your system or printer characteristics.Ĭurrent versions of Microsoft Word and other word processors can save to PDF format directly. The PDF file format is specifically created to solve this problem. Unfortunately, “close” is vague, and can be startlingly different from what you intended. Word will substitute something “close” to the font you wanted. If you create a document using one font that happens to be installed on your computer, and then view it on another system where the font is not present, things will look different. Different system, different lookĪnother common difference is fonts, which are not the same across systems. Default margins, paper size, and other differences in both capability and configuration can make a document appear very differently when viewed or printed on one system as compared to another. When Word displays a document in a print layout or page view, it uses the characteristics of the currently-selected printer to determine what the document will look like when printed. Word processors like Word are generally designed to produce documents to be printed. In a nutshell: it’s all about the printer. Your client is on the right track: that’s exactly what PDF is for. They were never meant to distribute documents to others for reading. Word documents were never intended to do what you’re doing.

Why do word documents open with wide grey borders