Video: Default margin

In this video, find out how to set a default margin for all documents.

Set the default margin

1. Click PAGE LAYOUT > Margins.

2. At the bottom, click Custom Margins.

3. In the Page Setup box, enter new values for the margins.

4. Click the Set As Default button.

Want more?

Set page margins

My top margin is missing

Change the margins between text and the edge of a text box or shape

In the first video of this series, we set a custom margin.

I am going to show you how to make that margins stick, by making it the Default Margin in Word.

And how we do that? As we go to the PAGE LAYOUT tab, and over on the left, we click Margins, and then we click Custom Margins... down at the bottom.

Now, here we have our 2.5-inch margin here on the right, and that's what we want to stick to, for only documents.

So we’ll go down to the lower left here and click Set As Default.

Word asks us: "Do you want to change the default settings for page setup?" Yes, I do. I do want to change the default settings for all new documents going forward. So I’ll click Yes. And now let’s test this out.

We’ll go to the FILE tab. We’ll click New, and then, we'll double-click Blank document.

And you can see over on the right, here for our ruler, we have a gray area that indicates that 2.5-inch margin.

And it’s even more apparent when I paste some text. You can see, I have this wide 2.5-inch margin, here on the right.

So that’s how to change the default margin in Word.

Up next, we're going to set different margins for your headers and footers.