Using Office 365 and Word why does my A5 page print on the left hand side of the physical page at a smaller size

Question

This is a question and an answer.

I have been trying for hours to work out why my 30 page Word document (A5 size pages) will not print correctly. It prints at a smaller size than expected with a large blank area to the right of each page.

Purely by accident I spotted a Comment in the document, put there by a colleague doing some editing and reviewing.

I decided to remove the Comment as it wasn't relevant any more.

Instantly every page in the document moved to the centre of the window and the document now prints exactly as I would expect.

It would seem that Word was trying to print everything in the document including Comments and was therefore making allowance for the additional width such comments make on the screen.

So if your document has been edited and comments added make sure you remove them before you try to print the document, otherwise you will see a smaller printed version than you were expecting and each page will have a large blank area on its right hand side, apart from the ones with comments on them.

Answer 1

It sounds like the issue you experienced with your A5 document printing at a smaller size was related to the presence of comments in the document. When comments are added, Word adjusts the layout to accommodate them, which can lead to unexpected printing results, such as additional blank space on the right side of the pages. By removing the comments, you allowed Word to center the content correctly on the page, resulting in the expected print output.

To avoid similar issues in the future, it's a good practice to check for any comments or other annotations in your document before printing, especially if the layout appears off. This will ensure that the document prints as intended without unnecessary adjustments for additional content that may not be relevant to the final printout.

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References:

• How to troubleshoot damaged documents in Word
• Troubleshoot problems that occur when you start or use Word

Answer 2

As you have found, in a document with comments and/or tracked changes, Word reserves space for the markup area in which the comments and changes will print. You can verify this by looking at the document print preview at File > Print.