phantom formatting. seriuosly

[imm]

I am so frustrated that I am about to switch to Openoffice. I love WORD for many reasons, and I have been using it for, oh, 10 years or so, but I am at my wits end. Your assistance is appreciated.



I have a phantom formatting issue. Autoformatting is completely turned off. When I cut and past in ANY text from another document or website, it comes in as bold. That's not my real problem, but if you have an answer for me there; great.

So when I paste new text in, WORD creates about 2/3 a page worth of blank, white space. ONLY SOMETIMES. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when this occurs. When I "reveal formatting" to see what it's doing, there is NOTHING (no hidden formatting marks) there. There has been no accidentally inserted "page break." When I attempt to delete the space, it treats the space as if it were the end of a page. (e.g. if i backspace from below the space, i will delete text above the space.)

For what its worth I'm on an Apple.

This is incredibly frustrating when I'm trying to prepare a document to appear uniform

I'd love your commiseration, or advice. I found this link and thought it funny. http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/chi/68374006.html