Eco-Tip: Narrow Your Word Document Margins
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA on 08.30.07
Tamara Krinsky has a remarkably simple idea to conserve paper: Set your word document's margin settings as narrow as possible before you send it to the printer.
Krinsky was an aspiring (read: starving) actress/writer, who had to print sheaves of scripts and articles, when the brainwave hit her. Narrower margin settings mean you can squeeze in more text per page, which in turn reduces the number of sheets of paper you'll need. For a person of very limited means, Krinsky says, these savings matter. "When a single paycheck stands between making rent at the end of the month and getting an eviction notice," she writes on her Web site, "you do whatever it takes!"
And now she wants Microsoft, the creator of the most popular word-processing software, like, ever, to do whatever it takes for the planet.
"The default margins for Microsoft Word are set at 1.25" on each side," Krinsky says. "According to the good people on the Microsoft Help line, there is no technical reason for this. It's merely a convention we have all gotten used to. Documents will print just as easily if you change the margins to 0.75" on each side."
We could all shift our margins ourselves, but Krinsky understands the basic human condition: We may not always do what is right, but we'll do whatever is easy.
She's slapped together a petition to Microsoft to officially set Word's default margins to 0.75", "so people wouldn't have to think about it." Are you feeling this, Bill Gates? :: Change the Margins
OR...edit your stuff better. I work in a library and there are a number of crazy fringe publications (left and right) that have narrow margins. They are unpleasant to read and impossible to photocopy legibly, and when you read them. they're full of extraneous ideological junk.
One of my college profs told me that you should practice putting EVERY idea into a 250 word piece, and if you can't, then cut the idea in half and try with two 250 word pieces.
The margin is the blank space around the text... So why would decreasing this be making it wider? Isn't that making the margins smaller?
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You know, you're totally right. I just riffed off what she sent us; I'm going to change this.
I work at a magazine, and we print a lot of Word docs each month when handing them in to the Design dept. to be laid out in Quark.
Even changing the margins to 1.0" all around will save almost an entire page on a document that's more than a few pages long.
I'll start changing things to 0.75" from now on. Thanks!
OH, and don't forget that you can change the default settings on YOUR OWN computer. No need to wait for Gates.
More tips...always do print preview--it's surprising how many worthless pages come out, particularly with Excel docs, if you haven't formatted correctly. It also saves you from that Word doc with a last page page with only one line of text on it.
If you're getting a new printer, get one with duplex (both sides of the page) printing capabilities!
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And printing in draft mode for internal docs helps stretch out the toner.
also, print double-sided if your printer supports it.
also, Print on the blank side of previously printed paper - if you dont mind having random stuff on the other side of the paper.
I'd guess that the margin default size can be traced back to the technology limits imposed by typewriters or possibly binding for offset press prints. It's useful to have margin space to make notes for editing of others work, but if you edit your own using the markup feature of Word its absolutely of no use.
And more tips:
Print in 70% gray. 30% savings on the ink/toner cartridge, and you'll never see the difference.
Better still, don't print at all! You'll save even more paper.
Narrower columns of text are easier to read, that's why novels are the shape they are. If it doesn't matter reduce the margins though!
Better yet, don't buy a printer at all. I've gone without one for 4 years and it forces you to print only what is absolutely necessary. (speaking with respect to personal use).
Doublesided printing? Sure. Margins of less than an inch, reducing the space between lines, making fonts smaller than 10 points for body text? Absolutely not. If you aren't willing to print something out in a legible form, do us all a favor and don't print it at all, and just send the document electronically.
Word generates printed text that's bad enough as it is when it comes to readability; please don't encourage people to make it worse.
I think that some of us might be overstating the requirementts of "legibility." As a college student I regularly need to read multiple journal articles of such length that on-screen reading is impractical (reading black text on a white field would essentially amount to staring at a light bulb for several hours a week, plus annotation is practically impossible).
I routinely print two-pages-per-sheet (resulting in smaller-than-8-point text) with reduced margins, and I do this double sided, resulting in four pages of text on a single sheet of paper, and my printer doesn't support duplex printing, it's simply a moment's work to select "even only," print half your document, flip the sheets and print "odd only." I've never tried printing in dark gray, but it certainly sounds like it's worth a try in the never-ending quest to save economic and ecological resources. I realize that my methods might not be practical for everyone in all situations, but reducing a 16-page article to four densely packed sheets certainly seems worthwhile whenever it's an option.
Being a graduate pharmacy student I can think of many legitimate reasons that I have to print thousands of pages of information each semester, for those of you who say don't print at all. Over the past several years here is what I have learned:
Your documents will print just fine with a 0.6" border on all sides, reducing your font to size 11 is just as readable as a 12 yet it will save you approximately 1 page per every 6-7 pages of text, and finally every printer I have ever used will print all even or all odd pages. What is that good for? Well you can manually flip the around and print the other side that way, you don't need a fancy duplexer.
Zac
Not much of a save, but thinking that way is a possitive.
You can't save it all, but you can make a little difference.
When I absolutely have to print a document I will use 2up double sided (4 pages per sheet). 2up is still quite legible for most people with average eyesight (I wear glasses btw). If my work would give me a lappy, I'd just use the comment feature in Word and then I wouldn't have to print at all for document reviews.
As for reading on a computer, what's the problem? Everyone seems to be able to read and blogs and other websites for endless hours a day, why not documentation? :)
Oh, one handy tip - when you have to print off powerpoint slides, print them off as handouts. 6 slides per handout page is usually quite legible. Print double sided and you just got 12 slides on a sheet of paper.
I'm a graphic designer, some other space saving options that haven't been mentioned come to mind. On use single spaces after Periods. Using double is wrong, they taught you wrong in school. Every publication uses single spaces. Make the leading, or line spacing single, or 1.5 lines at most, double line spacing looks bad and wastes lots of space. Finally if you can, use two or even three columns, like a magazine or a news paper, you can fit much more text than one column and it can even be easier to read.
Print doing 'fastdraft' - as a computer geek the sellers of printers dont tell you that fast draft looks exactly the same, and used 70% less ink.
It must be a slow day in the Treehugger newsroom.
Why not write in IM-speak too? A point size of 6 is readable to people with good eyes or those with a magnifying glass. Maybe just provide a hyperlink to an online version of verbose text (rendered, of course with a black background).
also use 11.5pt font instead of 12, and if you go down to .6 on all the sides I think all printers will print that...
If I'm printing lecture notes, then I'm down to 10pt font...saves so much paper!
On top of using wider margins, you can also use two columns. Columns reduce the amount of space used at the end of paragraphs.
It's so distressing to see that previous comments have bemoaned reading a document with slightly narrower margins. www.changethemargins.com is such a simple solution that could save so much paper. Why crap all over it because your reading MIGHT be a little bit more difficult? Really petty.