... in the world of Technical Communication

I’m a big fan of using styles when I author documents in MS Word. While I’ve generally found Styles to be the easiest way for me to produce consistent formats, I’ve always been frustrated with the non-native functionality of suppressing the “space before” settings when I insert a page break. Thus far, I’ve worked around this issue by using manual spaces (horrible, I know!).

Today, however, I decided I was tired workarounds. There must be a better way! A quick Google search led me to Allen Wyatt’s Word Tips. The article provided background about this issue as well as the location where you can adjust this setting (in Word 2003): Tools à Options à Compatibility Tab à “Suppress Space Before after a hard page or column break.”

Check the box next to the item then click OK.

Ta-da! Now when you insert a page break, the space before is suppressed. This ensures the first line on each page is in the same spot, no matter what type of style it is. (Typically my space before setting varies between headings and body styles. Previously, this resulted in varying alignments at the top of the page if I inserted a page break.)

A couple things to note:

• Allen Wyatt’s article stated that checking this box didn’t fix the problem. He provides some good recommendations for what to do if this doesn’t work for you. Possibly an update to Word between the time he wrote his article and now fixed this functionality so it works as we expect.
• For my environment, I’ve have to specifically set this property for each Word instance I open. It doesn’t seem to carryover to all new instances of Word.
• For Word 2007, the Options window is access through the Office button.