I'm not sure what you speak of
regarding "I just feel like a lot of confusion about how Word works arises
directly from Page Layout view"?
Because Word doesn't really think in terms of pages, it deals in different
streams of text. Normal View is what is normal for Word, not for us.
So one person posted "word doesn't spellcheck footnotes." Well, Word does,
it just checks all the text in the main body, then goes back and checks all
the notes. In Normal View, footnotes open in a separate pane and it's
completely self-explanatory that this is a separate stream of text. In Page
Layout view, it looks like Word is skipping part of the page, people panic,
post for help....
One person (recently) thought the formatting of his numbered list messed up
at the top of the next page because footnotes interrupted it. Well,
footnotes are in a different stream of text, they aren't interrupting his
list, so he was on a completely wrong track to find a solution. (didn't
post back, though, so I don't know how that worked out)
All the people who ask if they can shuffle pages around like slides in
powerpoint and don't understand why they can't--in Normal View, it's
completely clear that page breaks are shifting and random and often don't
even show up. Normal View users wouldn't even think of that as a question,
I suspect.
"My margins show faded out in page layout view". Well, yeah, because Headers
and Footers are a completely different segment of the doc, that's how Word
works. Again, in Normal View this is pretty self-explanatory, cause you
can't see the margins. You know pretty well there's something very
different about them when Word switches you into Page Layout to mess with
them, the fade is clearly just another piece of that difference.
By the time computer screens were big enough to make Page Layout view
feasible, I was already accustomed to Normal View and didn't switch. But
then when I found the newsgroups (two yrs ago?) and started learning a lot
more about Word, much of it made immediate sense to me because it was just
explaining the behavior I was already seeing.
Since it is sort of OT, it isn't that big a deal. Just curious.
Yes, but I'm covertly proselytizing for Normal View, I was hoping you would
ask.
It's not OT for the ng as a whole, anyhow.