Change page layout

- [Instructor] If you've been following along with me so far, you know how you can apply formatting to selected text. You can also format entire paragraphs. Well, we can also apply formatting to entire pages. And that's going to be our focus in this chapter, beginning with some layout options. And we'll apply them to our current document, the Tech Connect document we've been building, 0501, if you're catching up. As we scroll down, you can see we're looking at two pages, our table on page two. Layout changes can affect the length of our document and how it appears.

We'll access those from the Layout tab on the ribbon. Click there. On the left, you'll see some options for changing margins, orientation, and size. That's going to be the focus in this movie. Let's start with size. Clicking the dropdown will show you the currently selected paper size, US Letter Borderless. We can get nice and close to the edge when printing using the borderless option. There's also US Letter, 8 1/2 by 11. There's legal, it's a little bit longer, 8 1/2 by 14, and some other options with their measurements, like A5 and four.

You can see some measurements here that are ideal for working with cards and envelopes, for example. Let's try Legal and see what that looks like. At first glance, on page one here, it doesn't look a lot different, but as we scroll down, we suddenly see there's a lot more room at the bottom of our page. And if you have the rulers turned on, you'll see the width hasn't changed across the top, but the length is going all the way down to 14 inches. If you're not seeing the ruler, remember, you can always go back to the View tab here, click the check box to turn it on.

Go back to the Home tab. So that's one option. Let's go back to Layout and switch it back now by clicking the Size dropdown to US Letter Borderless. Another thing we can do is turn pages on their sides. Works for different kinds of documents, like posters, for example. If we go to Orientation, you'll see Portrait is selected, meaning it's taller than it is wide. Landscape flips it on its side, let's try it. As we scroll down now, you can see there's not enough room on one page for all of our text, so we get a new page.

Then we put in a page break after that last paragraph to add our table on its own page and everything's shifted over to the left. Doesn't fit nicely like it did in Portrait mode. So let's go back to Orientation and choose Portrait. That'll look much better and our table's back in the middle. The other thing we can adjust are the margins. The default margins we saw when starting a new blank document was one inch all the way around, but there are some presets to choose from, and you can customize these as well.

Click the Margins dropdown. You'll see Normal is one inch at the top, bottom, left, and right. Narrow is a 1/2 inch all the way around. That's what we're currently using. There's a Moderate one, where you see a larger margin at the top, and you can see at the bottom as well, whereas as the left and right are squeezed in a little bit, 2.75. We also have Wide margins, Mirrored, and there it is, Custom Margins. Clicking here opens up a dialog where you can type in the values you want for your specific margins.

Now, with .5 all the way around the outside, let's see what happens when we click OK. For me and my printer, it looks like this would print outside the area that is printable with my printer. You may not be seeing this. It depends on the printer connected to Microsoft Word, but here's the beauty, there's a Fix button. And clicking this will actually adjust the margins. You can see, it's bumped it up from the bottom to .56 to create that extra space needed when printing. Clicking OK creates those custom margins.

As I scroll down, I can see there's still plenty of room and everything looks the same, but I can be confident now, knowing that when I go to print this on my printer, everything's going to print out the way it should. So the layout options for margins, orientation, and size are easily accessible, easily changed. I highly recommend setting these up ahead of time because it you're going to apply it to an existing document, like we are, you're going to see things move around, shift around, you can save yourself some time and effort by knowing exactly what you want for margins, orientation, and size before you begin.