MS Word will not let me set the right hand margin beyond 6 in Office Professional 2003. Always before I had word margins set to 0.7 for top, bottom, left & right. It's worked for me for many years of using word that way. Due to multiply issues with Windows 10 after the last update my computer crashed & lost the boot sector & the only official MS OS disk I had was my windows 7 pro, so I had to do a complete reinstall back to 7 which is where I plan to stay. MS has become too invasive!


I am attaching a screen capture to hopefully show my dilemma.

Attached Images

word doc1 Nov. 07 06.43.jpg (49.3 KB, 21 views)

Changing side margins in a multi-column document is going to be problematic. Try removing the columns, setting your margins, and then reinstalling the columns.

This is supposed to be a default document with no columns; just a blank page like in a letter 8.5x11.

Step-by-step, what are you doing. Start with opening Word with a blank document. What do you click on, what do you see, what happens when you click on something?

Charles, here is what I've tried. After opening the default word document the arrow at top right of page is sitting on/or about the 6 mark. Going to File>Page setup & on the margins tab I set all my margins @ 0.5 then click on the portrait icon & then ok. Clicking ok brings up the popup stating that the right column would be too small. I've spent probably 2 hours trying different settings in the Format> Columns area but to no avail. I even went into where the Normal.doc resides in the Template folder & deleted it but Word recreated it in the same format that I was trying to get rid of. My final work-a-round was to copy an old Word document that had the settings I like to my desktop & save as a template which works great for me. This just started after upgrading to 7 Professional.

Windows 7 or Office 2007?
The ability to set narrow margins in Word is very much tied to the printer driver being used (which will change with operating systems).