RE: Page Margins in Word

["Fred Ridder" <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Deleting "extra" section breaks in a Word document is a perilous
activity, because Word embeds a lot of formatting in that innocent-
looking double dotted line, including the basic page/column layout
and the headers and footers. You can wind up spending a *lot*
of time fixing header/footer issues that were caused by the casual
deletion of an "unnecessary" section break. What often happens is
that one section break will contain the formatting for a desired
change in headers/footers while another, separate section break
in the same location contains the formatting for a desired
transition in column layout, and deleting either of them will screw
up the overall design of the document. And then factor in that
any given section break can specify a normal page break, a page
break to an even or odd page (the possible source of your original
extra page) or no page break at all, and you can start to see how
messy working with section breaks can be.

As to your question about negative indents, this can be a very
useful capability. As you've already noticed, it is one fairly simple
(if inelegant) way to implement sideheads. But another useful
trick is to set a larger than normal right margin for the section
that contains your TOC (and/or LOT or LOF) and then place the
tab that sets the alignment of the page numbers to be outside
the right margin. What happens in this case is that the right
indent (the margin) determines where long headings/captions
break to a second line while the page numbers stay neatly
right-aligned and always with a certain minimum length of leader
dots. It's really annoying how hard it is in some other authoring
tools to keep long TOC/LOT/LOF entries from colliding with
their page numbers.

My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder
Intel
Parsippany, NJ