Many thanks for your help on both posts
--
Carys


"Jay Freedman" wrote:

The article I mentioned in my reply to your other post,
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Custom...alTemplate.htm,
also shows how to change the default margins.

Be careful with this, though. Very wide text is hard to read, because
your eye tends to lose track of the location as it goes from the end
of one line to the beginning of the next. For ordinary text of 10 or
11 pt with the standard line spacing, the widest line that's
reasonably comfortable to read is about 6 inches. That's why the
default margins are 1.25 inches on both sides of 8.5 inch Letter-size
paper.

You can push the width a bit larger without damaging the readability
too much by increasing the line spacing. Most "body text" fonts space
the base lines at about 120% of the font size, so single-spaced 10 pt
text is placed on lines 12 pt apart. If you reduce the margins to 1
inch, for a 6.5 inch column, you should set the line spacing (in the
Format Paragraph dialog) to "At Least" 14 pt or 15 pt.

You might be better served to leave the regular text margins as they
are, and just let the wide tables hang out in the margins. Another
ploy is to use smaller fonts in the tables.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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On Sun, 18 Jun 2006 12:59:01 -0700, Carys
wrote:

My problem is that I am formatting large docs for other people (who have even
less experience of word than I do! and that's saying something). As a quick
fix to get stuff like tables to fit on one page I have been changing the
margins from Word default to whatever will fit and be printable. This is ok
but I would prefer the page sizes to be consistent throughout the doc and was
just wondering if anyone out there had a standard size.

From your reply it sounds as though there is no std size. Should have
guessed really, everyone is doing something different.

Thanks anyway