word doc and open office

One option:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/w...n-an-earlier-version-of-word-HA010044473.aspx

 

I edit and format doctoral dissertations in Word. There are a couple of things that are likely... First, turn on the paragraph marks so that you can see what is happening in the text. Don't worry, the paragraph marks are non-printing and they will not effect the final formatting of the document, but they do allow one to see where the enter key has been hit (backward "p" mark), tab used (arrow), space bar (dot), or other formatting like shift+enter (reverse curve arrow), etc.

Another thing that can be seen is section breaks, both page level and within the text. Sometimes one word processor will set section breaks often where another doesn't, and vice versa.

Once one can see what is going on in the text, the next step is to remove all the offending formatting, which one can do manually, one line at a time, or more quickly by applying styles, whichever is the more comfortable. At times, the best way is to simply cut and paste the text into a new document and re-apply formatting.

There are also some controls in the "page setup" area that effect how text is handled, so check that out as well.