Microsoft’s “hot patch” for Word 2013 fixes major problem w/ legal pleadings

Microsoft has issued a “hot patch” for Word 2013 that fixes, among other things, a major issue for law firms and other organizations that use lined and numbered pleading paper for their court documents. The issue, as I understand it, was that the ability to tweak the pleading line spacing by using the “Suppress extra line spacing at top of page” configuration option was not available for files saved in the (now standard) .docx format. (This option, located under the Advanced Word Options > Compatibility Options > Layout, had been available in both Word 2007 and Word 2010 regardless of whether the file had been saved in .doc or .docx format.) The lack of that option made it difficult, if not impossible, to align text with the pleading line numbers in certain documents and templates.

The patch, which Microsoft issued yesterday (February 10, 2015), restores the missing option in Word 2013.

For more information, see this Microsoft support article.  The article describes the features / functions that the patch fixes and also includes links to download the patch for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Word 2013.