0

I have a long report that has developed the problem of an unusually thick border. There is nothing in the footer and I have created an example document that is an emptied version of my report document with one thing in the header. The thick footer is greatly restricting how much I can fit on each page. How can I remove this thick border and return to default. Copying and pasting the entire report into a new document brings back these chunky footers. The ruler shows the footer size to be default yet in reality its much bigger. Removing footer does nothing. Changing the position does nothing. There is no spacing. This is literally driving me insane.

edit: I decided to re-create the report by making a new document and copying very small sections of text only. After slowly adding the original report in bit by bit, it seemed like the thick footer appeared while adding a certain line of text just before the number of columns changed. After further investigation I found that when I used different numbers of columns on the same page, other strange things started happening. Pages that were made using page breaks were undeletable after changing page size with no text cursor on the page and delete and backspace doing nothing, page size of the first page was not respected when adding a new page, an page was created at the end of the document at some point in my investigation with the same font as the line earlier in the report that caused the thick footer and was unable to be changed or the page removed. Other stuff happened that is very hard to explain clearly without an essay. Also I should mention that the default template is completely fine. The document I have shown as an example has nothing in it at all and the text style set to normal. My guess is that the template I'm required to use is old and broken. My new report document that I made from scratch to look like the template works.

The blank document with my report content and everything removed (thick footer remains): http://www.filedropper.com/thickfooter_4

Thick border bottom cropped

Thick border whole page

Thick border whole page paragraph things

Improve this question

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

The screen clips you've provided clearly show that you do not have the document's paragraph marks displayed. Go to the Home tab on Word's Ribbon and click on the Pilcrow icon, it looks like a backwards P and it's in the Paragraph group. Alternately use the Ctrl + * keyboard shortcut to toggle showing of these very important document elements. The show where each paragraph ends.

Your footer in this document has either extra blank paragraphs that need to get deleted or one of the paragraphs has a setting on it to include extra space (blank) after.

If this problem is only happening in one document, then it is not a problem with your Normal template.

Turn the Show/Hide Paragraph Marks on and update your post with it if you are unsure how to delete or fix the errant paragraphs.

Improve this answer
0

Since you removed the footer and created a new document without results, try resetting the Word Normal Template to Default.

To have Word re-create the Normal template, follow these steps to rename the original file:

Quit Word.

Open Windows Explorer Navigate to %USERPROFILE%AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTemplates and see the Normal.dotm file.

Rename this file as Normal-old.dotm

Restart Word and then see if your documents look normal.

It is usually a Normal template issue that causes what you see.

Improve this answer
2
  • I hadn't made a new document, I simply deleted everything in my report (a copy of course). The default template works just fine with no thick footer. I'll make my explanation better to clarify :).
    – MrYorkiebar
    Commented Dec 2, 2020 at 0:31
  • The new default template was part of my answer and you are now saying that works.
    – anon
    Commented Dec 2, 2020 at 0:33

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .