The preview at the bottom of the window will give you a very rough idea of how the document will look with your selected measurements. You can do this either by clicking the up and down arrows in each field to change the margins in small increments, or you can simply type the number into each field. In most cases, all you need to worry about is the top section where you set the size of the margins for the top, bottom, left and right of the page. The Page Setup dialog will open, with the Margins tab selected. If none of the options you try give the result you want, go to the bottom of the list and select Custom Margins. In Page View with pages separated, the top and bottom margins can also be dragged around on the vertical ruler.

Select the text then drag the margin markers to the settings you want. Margin shown in the ruler with different setting for a single paragraph. The bottom marker on the ruler is the margin. The other way to change margins is with the ruler.

If you have set your own custom margins before, there will also be an option at the top to set your margins to whatever you set them to last time you did so. In this case, one side of the page has to leave room for the binding, and the extra space will be on the left on one side of the page, and on the right-hand side on the reverse, so the facing pages will ‘mirror’ each other. The Mirrored option is a bit less obvious, use this one if you are printing double-sided pages that are to be bound together like a book or magazine. Normal, Narrow, Moderate and Wide are fairly self-explanatory – try each one to see if any of these preset options give you the result you want.

There are several default options that you can choose from. To do this, go to Layout > Margins or use the Ruler to drag the margins. Sometimes we want to change the margins around a Word document, either to change the way the page looks, or to get the text to fit onto the page.

Custom margins word 2016