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Want to add some design to your document but not sure how? Well, setting custom margins in Word is one way you can do this. You can adjust margins by specifying your own custom settings. Or, for a quicker alternative, you may wish to take advantage of Word’s predefined settings. Either way, when you adjust the margins in your document, this moves you away from the Word default. And as such, will help add that extra bit of design you’re looking for.
Word documents (created from the Normal template) contain uniform margin sizes by default – set to 2.54 cm (1”). This offers a good amount of white space and works well for most documents.
There’ll be times however where you’ll want to adjust margin settings. As you’ll see, the process is straightforward.
How to adjust margins
As mentioned, when adjusting margins, you can specify your own settings. Or take advantage of Word’s predefined margin configurations.
The predefined configurations appear when you click the Margins button (Layout > Page Setup). There are a handful of options, apart from Word’s default setting (Normal).
If you’d like to use a predefined option, simply select your preference from the menu that appears (see image below).
If you decide to set custom margins instead, adjust margins as follows:
- Click the Margins button (Layout > Page Setup);
- Select Custom Margins;
- Change margin settings as required;
- Click OK.
Note that the above process applies where a document doesn’t contain sections.
There’s a different process to take where a document includes sections. Similarly, where you’d like the change to take effect in only one section of your document.
To change margins for all sections in a document, select all content (Ctrl+A). Then set margins as required.
To modify margins for one section only, there’s no need to select content before making the change. All you need to do is place the cursor in the relevant section, and then adjust margins (per above).
Important: when adjusting margins, be sure to consider how the change might affect the cover page (if included), and/or headers and footers. This is important if you’re setting margins that aren’t uniform. And/or if margins stray substantially from the default setting.
