Page margin change changes footer margin (Word 2002 SP-2)

[st3333ve]

I searched the site for an answer (and waded through a few pages of Google results), to no avail. I suspect the reason may be that you just don't change margins this way in Word, you use paragraph formats instead.

My problem is that I have a closely-clustered series of continuous section breaks, each of which changes the left margin (and each of which has Same As Previous for a footer setting). Depending on where the page breaks occur in relation to these short sections, the footer margin for the affected page changes accordingly. Is it possible to change page margins without affecting the footer margins for those sections?

And while we're on the subject, when I view Headers and Footers in the midst of these breaks, the buttons to move me to the next and previous footers won't let me get to most of them (I believe the inaccessible ones are the ones that won't display on any page given the current page breaks). Is there an easy solution (i.e., easier than temporarily adding a bunch of dummy paragraphs to the body of the document to cause the footer you want to get at to be a "displaying" footer)?

[StuartR]

I don't think word has a concept of a separate margin for footers, they're just part of the page and use the same margin as the page they are on.

You say that you "suspect the reason may be that you just don't change margins this way in Word, you use paragraph formats instead" and I am sure that this is correct. Is there a reason that you can't use paragraph formats to achieve what you want.

StuartR

[st3333ve]

I could definitely use paragraph formats, but I've been absorbing lots of advice about avoiding direct formatting and I wasn't relishing the thought of creating yet another group of styles that would be exact imitations of an existing bunch of styles but just indented to the right by two inches (or three or four).

I'm thinking tables may be the best solution -- i.e., anywhere I would otherwise have temporarily changed the margin to, say, 4 inches, I could just create a one-row, two-column table whose right column starts at 4 inches and put the text in the right column.

[StuartR]

Tables is quite a good approach for this.
Using built in styles such as body text indent and body text indent 2 can work well, you may have to modify the styles to suit.
A single multi-level bulletted style (with no actual bullets) could also do what you want.
Direct formatting is also possible.
Section breaks that move the page margins multiple times on one page is definitely not right.

StuartR

[st3333ve]

<<Section breaks that move the page margins multiple times on one page is definitely not right.>>

Duly noted. (Another WordPerfect habit bites the dust.)

Thanks for your replies.