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About this lesson
Learn how to set margins to standard or custom settings.
Exercise files
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Quick reference
Margins
Learn how to set page margins to standard or custom settings.
When to use
Margins are a vital setting in EVERY document. You don’t finish a document without verifying the margin settings.
Instructions
Three places to find Margin settings:
- Page Layout Ribbon
- Print Preview screen (or Ctrl P)
- Top Ruler and Left Ruler
Tips to know:
- Gutters are only used if a large manuscript will be bound at a print shop. You would verify with them before placing a measurement, usually .3, into the gutter setting box. Generally, a gutter setting is not used, but it is nice to know what it is for.
Hints & tips
- If you find that you change your margins every time you use Word, then set the default margins once and for all, found at the bottom of the Page Setup screen
- 00:04 Setting up page margins is actually really important,
- 00:07 because it tells the printer how close to print to the edge of the paper.
- 00:10 So the closest most printers will print is a quarter inch.
- 00:13 But traditionally, a document will have one inch margins top, bottom, left, right.
- 00:18 So let's go ahead and find out where we set up those margins and
- 00:21 how we change them.
- 00:22 It's on the Layout ribbon up on top, but that's a long way to travel, right?
- 00:25 Come way up here, hit Layout, and then come over here to the left,
- 00:29 find margins and hit that one, and there we have it.
- 00:32 A long way to travel.
- 00:33 I'm going to show you some shortcuts in the next few steps, but
- 00:36 let's stay here for a second.
- 00:37 There's a scrollbar here, we can scroll through and see all of the current
- 00:41 settings, narrow settings, moderate settings, wide, mirrored settings.
- 00:46 It all depends on what kind of a document you're creating.
- 00:49 Notice the bottom, Custom Margins,
- 00:51 you can click the Custom Margins, typing in your own measurements.
- 00:55 And on the left, we have a Gutter.
- 00:57 We have Gutters, 0 inch, Gutter position, Left.
- 00:59 What in the world is a gutter?
- 01:01 Well, let me show you.
- 01:02 I got an example on the screen.
- 01:04 This is a gutter.
- 01:06 If you ever are using a comb, or a coil binding, or a wire binding,
- 01:10 it needs a quarter of an inch of that piece of paper to create the binding, and
- 01:14 then you want a one inch from that.
- 01:17 That's what a gutter is for, so just keep that in mind.
- 01:20 If that's a situation, you definitely want a gutter in there.
- 01:22 I want to jump back in there, but a different way.
- 01:25 The top ruler and left ruler, the gray areas of the margin, let's check this out.
- 01:30 So on the top ruler, this gray area is my left margin.
- 01:33 On the far right, the gray area is my white margin.
- 01:36 The white area of the ruler is my document.
- 01:38 If I put my mouse on that very edge at line between the white and
- 01:41 the gray, it identifies as right margin, I can click, and drag, and move it.
- 01:45 Same with the left.
- 01:46 If I float my mouse on that line, click and drag it,
- 01:50 you can see my entire margin shifting.
- 01:52 And over here on this edge, same thing.
- 01:55 I can adjust the top margin, scroll to the bottom, adjust the bottom margin, okay?
- 02:01 So you can do whatever you want.
- 02:03 But now that I've kind of messed them up, I just want to jump in there and fix it.
- 02:07 So double-click on the left ruler will jump me right back in to those custom
- 02:11 settings.
- 02:12 So floating my mouse in the white area of the ruler and double-click, click, click.
- 02:17 There it is, custom setting.
- 02:19 I don't know about you, but that was a lot easier than going to Layout, and Margin,
- 02:23 and Custom.
- 02:24 Just double-click on that ruler.
- 02:26 I could retype all these, 1 inch, 1 inch, 1 inch, 1 inch.
- 02:30 I'm going to set my gutter at 2.5 of an inch and tell it always on the left side.
- 02:36 This will apply to the entire document.
- 02:38 And you may not have noticed, but
- 02:40 this did change a little bit as soon as I told it quarter of an inch.
- 02:43 I'll hit OK, and there we are reset.
- 02:46 Okay, there's one more place to go, and that's a print preview.
- 02:49 So Ctrl+P takes us into Print preview, and near the bottom, we have the margins.
- 02:55 But this time, I can see the entire document on my screen.
- 02:59 So it's kind of cool.
- 03:00 So maybe I want moderate margins, or maybe I want narrower margins.
- 03:05 It's all up to me, whatever you want to do.
- 03:08 Technically, I always go for just the normal ones,
- 03:10 the traditional one inch all the way around and we're set.
- 03:14 To get out of Print preview without printing, there's a little Back button
- 03:17 way up here on the top-left, or you could hit Escape, and that would do it as well.
- 03:21 It'd be a great time to practice changing margins with this document,
- 03:25 so get good at that, and then I'll see you in the next lesson about page orientation.
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