[John]

Some features seem to persist from version to version of Word. One such
"feature" is the ability to set gutters for a document on the Page Setup,
Margins tab. As I understand it this option is there as a quick fix for users
who decide to bind their document and find that they haven't allowed enough
space in the margin to handle the dead space which the binding method
creates.

However, has anyone tried using this feature in practice? I created a
document with a left, right, top and bottom margin of 2.5cm. I also created a
header and specified it should start 1cm from the top of the page.

I then decided to add a gutter of 0.5cm to the left of the page. This
resulted in an effective left margin of 3cm. So far so good, although I'm not
sure why you can't just increase the value of the left margin itself to 3cm?
Both the header and the body text observed this change.

I then decided to change the gutter so that it appeared at the top of the
page instead. The body text dutifully moved down the page by 0.5cm. However
the header stayed at its specified position of 1cm from the top of the page.
Doesn't this behaviour mean that top gutters are pointless if you have
documents with headers?

If the option to set gutter and gutter position didn't exist would we
actually lose any flexibility? Can't the same thing be achieved by simply
changing the margins and the start position of the header?

As a general point adding a gutter to a document after it has been formated
is not necessarily a good idea since it reduces the amount of space available
for text and can therefore completely ruin the layout of the document.

I looked through quite a few books on Word before posting this question, but
none of them gave an example of where using gutters would be a good idea.

Does anyone here use gutters and if so did they solve a problem which
couldn't have been tackled in any other way? I would venture that most people
leave the gutter value at 0cm, so I'm curious as to why it persists between
versions. Hopefully someone on this board will be able to defend its
inclusion.

Regards,

J.