Mirror Margins in Word Not Working

Go to the very first page of the document and display the Page Layout dialog box (for example by double-clicking the vertical ruler). In the dialog box, make sure that "Section start" is set to "Odd page."

Gave it College try. You are right it did get magically set to "even". But the fix did not fix it. I tried Continuous, too...no luck. Nothing changes it.

Additionally, book page count went up 29 pages and am trying to fix that now.

Additionally--and related to page count issue--at bottom left where it says "Page x of xxx"...? Some pages (probably 29 of them) it now skips a page, going from 1 to 3 with no 2 in between. I checked that with Paragraph Displayed it is Section Break (Next Page) which does not cause that issue.

Looks like a waste of time at this point. Going back to earlier version.

Plot Twist: I went back a full version and still mostly have the problem. The mirror margins are still screwed up, however the baloney extra 29 pages are not there...so counting that as a win.

Trying to get this doc to printers and this is shaping up to be a huge hassle.

Went to first page and it was set to Section Start at New Page. Tried setting it to Odd Page and nothing happened. Tried setting to Continuous and nothing happened.

Appears to be inert feature and I have all current updates on system, have the subscription so in theory Office is always up to date yada yada.

There are at least two more things to check:

1) Is the page number restarting to an even number?

2) Could the page numbers be calculated with a formula field rather than inserted directly with a PAGE field?

Plot Twist 2: Turns out only 1st page in this version is screwed up. After that appears (from sampling of book) to be ok.

May just live with that one!

Plot Twist 3: the ruler bar shows margins are screwed up for Page 1. However, print preview shows correctly centering is based on proper mirror margins.

As former software engineer can say it suggests a fault being exercised relating to the mirroring feature being reflected in the horizontal ruler bar. I presumed the ruler bar was working correct and possibly the same is true of other version but do not have the time to go through for each affected page and check for that.

Anyway,, the kingdom appears safe in this version, with doc printing correctly (assuming print preview working correctly). Other version still unusable though due to paging issue and possibly margin issue.

Plot Twist 3: the ruler bar shows margins are screwed up for Page 1. However, print preview shows correctly centering is based on proper mirror margins.

As former software engineer can say it suggests a fault being exercised relating to the mirroring feature being reflected in the horizontal ruler bar. I presumed the ruler bar was working correct and possibly the same is true of other version but do not have the time to go through for each affected page and check for that.

Thanks for the follow-up.

Indeed, there is a known issue with the display of margins and indents on the horizontal ruler when mirror margins are activated. It only affects the first page, as far as I know.

I misunderstood your initial post; otherwise, I could have mentioned it sooner. :-)

No worries. Would add that the Section setting did automagically change itself in the affected doc to "Start Even", plus there was some other mangling relating to paging (as if the Section Break was set to "Odd Page" or "Even Page" for previous section rather than "Next Page"...but it was not.) Can provide more info on specific steps that exercised the issue in some way, if interested. At any rate, end result was that the book file was not salvageable.

As I mentioned earlier, you could look into page number restart settings as well (these are defined at the section level), if you haven't already done so.

It does appear that something is/was wrong with the affected document. It could be minor corruption.