Often when I open a document someone has emailed to me (or even one I authored at some point) to see it in the "Read View". What is the "Read View"? The read view is an attempt to have a layout that appears like you are reading a book with a left and right page. I suppose if you have good eyes there is nothing wrong with this, but if you find yourself as I do continually buying stronger glasses and changing your screen resolution to see what is on your PC. Or if you get distracted easily as I do and prefer to scan one page at a time(I often find half my attention on the page I should be reading and the other half trying to convince me that I can multi task and read to pages at one time). The result is usually not catching any of what I just attempted to read. If you you can relate to this then you probably would love to have the good Ole "Normal View" back as default.

It's not very complicated, ready?

Tools > Options > General tab > uncheck "Allow starting in Reading Layout."

See it took you longer to read this post and get to the point then to correct the problem.