If you’re a Google Workspace customer or Google Account free user, and you gain the great collaborative and time saving benefit of using Google Docs for your Word Processing, maybe you wanted to learn how to do certain little tricks!? In this tutorial, we describe how you can change the margin sizes on Google Docs in order to make your page narrower, wider or to increase or decrease the space at the top or bottom of your page.
Table of Contents
How to edit margins on Google Docs
First up, login to your Google Workspace account and access the document in question – an easy way to do this is to go to drive.google.com and search up the document title, or something mentioned in the document. I am also a heavy user of the “recent documents” section, as I work on the same docs a lot – that can be a good place to quickly find your doc.
Once you’re looking at the relevant document, you can move onto the tutorial, below.
Setting the margins for the whole document
First, Open the File Menu
Then, click “File” and find and click on “Page setup” which you can see in the image below.
This will bring up the following menu, where you can set your margin for top, bottom, left and right, and then click “OK” to make these changes apply.
Then set Top, Bottom, Left and Right margins
Finally, Click OK
When this is done, you’re done! This should have been a successful mission, Captain!
Set as default
NOTE – you can click “set as default” if you always want your docs to be formatted in this way, by default. This may save you repeating this step in the future, particularly if this is how you always setup your Docs.
Use a keyboard shortcut
You can quickly shortcut to the “File” menu by pressing:
`Alt+Shift+F`
Then you will have to physically click the “Page setup” option… there is no shortcut for this! To view all keyboard shortcuts for Google Docs, click here.
Setting the margins for a particular paragraph (or paragraphs)
If you’d like to adjust the margins for a specific paragraph – or paragraphs – maybe you’re writing a play, or a poem, or something for which you’d like to have a section of text “indented” in a uniform manner (or something!), then the below will get that done:
- Put your cursor into a paragraph of text (the one you’d like to adjust margins for) OR select by highlighting multiple paragraphs (if you’d like to adjust many)
- In the ruler at the top of the page, there will be a downwards pointing arrow at the left and right where the margin is set – drag this to move the margin for this paragraph(s)
- Done! You have set custom margins for a paragraph or paragraph within your Google Doc!
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Leave a comment below if this helped you get this done today. Silicon Dales are authorised resellers of the Google Workspace package for businesses.
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