[Simon Barnes]

Does anyone know the volume of paper that can be saved by changing the Word
default margin settings to say 2cm all round? Say use a percentage of sheets
per 1000 sheets printed

If anyone has a formulae that can be used - that would be even better

Many thanks

[Jay Freedman]

On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:39:02 -0800, Simon Barnes Simon
wrote:

Does anyone know the volume of paper that can be saved by changing the Word
default margin settings to say 2cm all round? Say use a percentage of sheets
per 1000 sheets printed

If anyone has a formulae that can be used - that would be even better

Many thanks


That would depend on what kind of documents you're printing.

If it's a novel, with many pages of long paragraphs that run margin to
margin in both directions, then the savings will be approximately the
fraction of the area that you've added to the main text. (And note
that the out-of-the-box default margins are different in Word 2007
than in earlier versions, so the fraction will be different.)

A large percentage of paragraphs that are one line long, or that end
with lines only slightly less than full paragraph width, will reduce
the savings.

If most of the documents are one-page memos, you'll hardly gain any
savings at all -- you'll still use the same number of sheets.

If it's a mix of document types, the results will be some
(unpredictable) savings between those extremes.

Besides the mathematical savings, consider readability. For typical
text in most body-text fonts and typical sizes, paragraphs that are
wider than about 15 cm are harder to read, because the eye tends to
lose position when tracking from the end of one line to the start of
the next. The readability of wider lines can be improved by increasing
the line spacing (leading), but that tradeoff leaves you with
approximately the same number of pages overall.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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