Page Layout: Ms-Word

By being aware of the page layout in your documents, you can ensure that everything looks good. Maybe you think that the text is the most important thing, and I agree with you, but the layout of your documents is the text’s "public face" and it is the first thing the reader sees.
A good layout, however, will give the reader a good first impression, which means that your pearls of wisdom stand a better chance of being read. This is equally important whether you are trying to sell an idea, a product, or yourself in a job application.
In this section you will learn how to align margins and tabs (tabulators), insert page numbers, create headers and footers and other cool features. You will also learn how to create two-sided prints.

 1 Margins

There are three things to remember when aligning margins:

1. Should there be room for headers and footers?
2. Should there be room for holes in the paper?
3. Does it look nice?

Whether the document looks nice is of course a subjective matter. As a rule of thumb, the margins should not be too small, meaning less than 1 cm. The pages will look too heavy if there is not enough space around the
text. Conversely, 3 cm would probably look a little crazy on an A4 page.

I usually work with a 2-cm margin on the left side and 1.5 cm on the right side. At the top I also have 1.5 cm, and at the bottom it is 2 cm. I think this gives a nice, balanced appearance.

However, if someone out there with graphic training should disagree with me, I defer.

When you read this book and look at the margins, you will discover that I have not used these sizes in the book. This is because I have let the publisher do the layout and concentrated on writing a good book.

1.1 Adjusting the Margins - the Quick Way

Enough talk about sizes of margins, now we will try to adjust them. There are two ways to adjust the margins. You can either adjust them visually with the mouse or edit them in the document settings for page setup. Visual adjustment is quick and reasonably accurate. Editing page setup is completely accurate, but it takes a little longer..

First I will show you how to adjust the margins using the mouse. It is quick, and I prefer this method myself. On certain occasions it might be necessary to adjust margins via page setup.

I will return to that in the next section.

1. 1. First ensure that you are in the Print Layout View. Click on the View Tab in the Ribbon and make sure the Print Layout button is pressed.
2. 2. On the same Tab in the Ribbon, you must also make sure that the rulers are displayed. There should be a ”tick” by Ruler.

A horizontal ruler is now being displayed at the top along with a vertical ruler on the left side. The rulers are white inside the document margins and light blue outside. When you place the mouse on the border between the white and light blue areas, the mouse arrow changes to a double-headed arrow.

To move the margin you simply press down the left mouse button when you see the double-headed arrow and drag the margin with the mouse. The default scale on the ruler is in centimeters, but it can be changed, for example to inches. This can be done in the Word-settings in the Advanced group.

The only place where it can be a little difficult to adjust the margin with the mouse is the left margin. There are
some icons just where you need to click, which makes it somewhat difficult to hit the right spot. So if you have
mandolin fever or you are just not very good with the mouse, you must enter Page Setup and adjust the margin
from there.
2 Adjusting Margins - the Accurate Somewhat Slower way

To adjust the margins with complete accuracy, click on the Margins button in the Page Layout Tab. This opens a menu where you can choose between five different pre-designed configurations, including a twosided setup. But if you click Custom Margins, you get access to fine-tuning everything.