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How can I change "normal, narrow, moderate, wide, and mirrowed" margins to metric measures?

Anonymous
2017-12-17T20:58:05+00:00

Although my system and Office install are in metric, showing 2.54 cm for most margins, I understand that it is just a translation from 1 inch, which is 2.54 cm (or 25.4 mm). Other wierd measures in Office metric margins are 19.1 mm, 31.8 mm, or 12.7 mm. This margin sizes are very unfriendly, and I would rather have rounded to the mm measures, for example. 

Especially when combined with A4 paper size this measures Word standard measures make the ruler to have strange distances that are difficult to divide when creating tabs, or placing indents.

Also, A4 is slightly narrower (5.9 mm) but a bit longer than US Letter size (17.6 mm). That makes the 2.54 sized margin too wide for A4 paper and adequate lenghtwise but still unconfortably weird.

My suggestion would be adding a metric option similar to this one:

Top-Bottom Left-Right Writing Height Writing width Ratio
A4 297 210 297 210 1.414286
Normal 26 21 245 168 1.458333
Narrow 13 10 271 190 1.426316
Moderate 26 16 245 178 1.376404
all sizes in mm

Or at least let the users choose all their presets so we can override the inch-centric measures that go smaller than a mm.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2017-12-17T22:26:47+00:00

    It is very easy to set up the margins that you want in a Template so that you do not have to set them every time.

    If you want to make a suggestion for changing the way in which Word works, you can do so at:

    http://word.uservoice.com/

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-12-17T22:52:52+00:00

    Hi Doug,

    Thank you for answer. As you could probably read, my question was not about changing margins, I now how to set that pretty easily. My question is if there is a way to change the presets outside of custom or changing the normal.dotm.

    If this can be done, either through internal features or workaround, I don't know them, neither I found an answer online.

    Indeed, if this can't be done I would suggest it, but I wanted to make sure it can't be done before asking for a new feature.

    Thank you again

    Sergio

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  3. Stefan Blom 341.2K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2017-12-17T23:01:15+00:00

    Doug didn't say so explicitly, but the answer is that you can't customize the presets under Layout | Margins. If you want that functionality to be added, you will have to post a suggestion for Microsoft in the Uservoice forum.

    However, it is fairly simple to set up a template with the desired margins. Just make the changes and save the document as a template (*.dotx). You don't have to customize Normal.dotm, if you don't want to.

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