Word 2013: Revisiting pleading alignment issues

First, let me apologize to regular visitors for the drought this last month.  A new firm to attend two, back to back colds, and an appellate argument had me running on fumes.  I intend to remedy the silence this week.  Before getting back to law, however, I need to revisit an issue I touched on once before - the exciting topic of line alignment in pleadings in Word.  See this prior post, explaining how to fix a problem I see all the time.

It turns out that my solution for fixing the problem does not work in Word 2013 (which I am using exclusively as a result of selecting Office 365 as the delivery mechanism for Office - and I highly recommend it, for the most part).  More specifically, Word 2013, when using the most current document format (docx, without the compatibility option enabled at the time you save), does not even incorporate the setting described in my post linked above.  Those settings are "deprecated."  It seems that Microsoft, in all its wisdom, thought a new layout engine for Word was in order.  I couldn't find a way to control text alignment with line numbering at the top of documents.  But Microsoft must surely have a way to do this that I just can't find, right?  Sooooo, no.

If you don't believe it, check out the thread I opened on Microsoft's technet site.  Now, to be clear, I am still not 100% convinced that what I am trying to do can't be done in Word 2013, using the current document format without the compatibility mode active.  The not-so-informative response I received is not filling me with confidence.

I may try to contact the Office team directly and see if they can suggest something.  If I have any luck, I will let you know.  Until then, I will keep cringing at Word pleadings that are misaligned on the first page.