Change the Margins

In the category of simple, ingenious ideas for everyone to save incredible amounts of paper and protect the environment with a VERY easy action...the winner is... Change the Margins! Its an effort to encourage everyone, and especially a few big corporations, to change their computers default settings in the widely used software program Microsoft Word to smaller page margins. This means more words fit per page - and less paper needed per job. They've even got a petition suggesting Microsoft go ahead and change the default right out the box.

Here a great National Public Radio story on the effort here.

How to Change Your Margins, from the website:

OK, so until we can get Microsoft to change the default margins, here's how to do it on your own. It should take no more than twenty seconds and just a few clicks of the mouse.

On your WORD screen, go to FILE, then PAGE SET UP.

Once on PAGE SET UP, click the DEFAULT key, and you'll be offered "Do you want to change the default settings for the page set up? This change will affect all new documents based on the normal template."

Then set your margins to whatever preferred new width you'd like. I'm suggesting setting each margin to .75" which will save an immense amount of paper.

Thanks for doing this! And I was right, huh? Twenty seconds or so? Not bad...

If you want more specific directions along with screenshots to guide you as you go, check out About.com's margin changin' tutorial.