Word Page Breaks Differ From the Original

The most common reason the page count changes is the font

A document does not record where its pages break. The program that opens it measures character widths, fills each line, and moves what overflows to the next page. So when the font used for measuring changes, line breaks shift, and the shifted lines add up until even the page count changes.

A difference of one or two characters can become a whole page by the end of the document. If you wrote page numbers on a cover or a table of contents, those numbers go off as well.

How to reduce it

1. If you opened it with "Quick open", just open it again. Fast open does not measure fonts, so its page breaks are the furthest off.
2. Look for a font notice at the top of the screen. If the document opened without its fonts, page breaks will not match in that document.
3. If a document needs page breaks in fixed places, insert a "page break" in the text yourself. Spots pushed into place with blank lines fall apart as soon as the font changes.

It cannot be made exactly the same

Page breaks only match when the font files the original used are present. If the document uses fonts this computer does not have, such as paid fonts, an approximation is as close as it gets. For documents where page breaks are a contractual requirement, exchanging them as PDF is the safe choice.