Hi,



I've been trying to find an answer for hours now. When I use a heading style with a page break it will not allow me to start that heading in the middle of the page (not center) I've selected about 300pnts of spacing, yet all it does is start the new heading at the top of the new page, I need it at the middle of the new page.


Thanks.

Odd that Word won't let you specify space before in this context.


To get the space correct, I think you'll need to use section breaks, not the built-in page break before feature in Paragraphs. With a section break, you can specify the amount of space before. Alternatively, you could set up the doc with First Page Different and have the top margin of the first pages of each section be at around mid-page.

Put your heading in a Frame (part of the style) and adjust the space before. You need not have any borders on the frame.
Frames and Textboxes in Microsoft Word

On a new page, Word ignores the Space-Before setting for the first paragraph and puts it at the top margin.

That's not the behaviour I'm seeing - a heading with a 300pt 'before' spacing and the 'page break before' option as part of its Style definition starts 300pt below the margin. If those attributes are not part of the Style definition and the heading is preceded by a manual page break, the 'before' spacing is liable to be reset to 0.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

There has been a change in the way Word honours the Paragraph Space Before setting on paragraphs appearing at the top of the page.

Prior to Word 2013, if the paragraph had both Space Before and Page Break before, it would push the paragraph down the page. If if didn't have Page Break before but did have Space Before then it would collapse the Space Before (which made sense since that paragraph just happened to fall on a new page rather than being forced there by a setting).

The new behaviour is actually part of the document compatibility format so you can see the changed behaviour by changing compatibility mode in a document.
If you run these commands one at a time you can see when the different formatting behaviour occurred.
ActiveDocument.SetCompatibilityMode (wdWord2016)
ActiveDocument.SetCompatibilityMode (wdWord2013)
ActiveDocument.SetCompatibilityMode (wdWord2010)
ActiveDocument.SetCompatibilityMode (wdWord2007)

So the 'solution' for your document is to change the document compatibility mode.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Andrew, thank you for the clarification. I know I didn't come up with the Frame idea until I was working in Word 2013.



AFAIK, they've been deprecating Frames since the Ribbon came out, or at least it seems that way.

Here is a picture showing these.




The two documents are in a Zip file with the two documents in my download folder. The differences can be seen in Word 2013 and later. Obviously, if opened in Word 2010 or earlier they will look pretty much the same.


This is essentially the same document opened in Word 2010 format and 2013 format. The only difference is on the third page where there is no Frame but is page-before paragraph formatting.