A page that is hard to read is usually not badly written — it is badly spaced. This page shows the four adjustments that do almost all the work: font size, line spacing, margins, and zoom. It also makes clear which of them change the printed page and which only change your screen.
Word opens at 11 point text with tight spacing and modest margins, which suits a memo and suits almost nothing else. If you find yourself leaning towards the screen, the document is asking to be adjusted — and adjusting it is four short actions on the Home and Layout tabs.
- Type a point size straight in
- 1.5 opens up a dense page
- Margins live on this tab
Font size is measured in points, in the small box on the Home tab. Twelve is standard for a letter; fourteen reads comfortably for most people; sixteen and above is genuinely large print. You can type a number straight into that box rather than hunting the list — and the two buttons beside it, a large A and a small A, nudge the size up and down one step at a time.
Line spacing usually matters more than size. Cramped lines make the eye lose its place at the end of every row, which is exhausting to read regardless of how big the letters are. The line-spacing button sits in the Paragraph group on Home — the icon with arrows beside stacked lines. Moving from 1.0 to 1.5 transforms a dense page.
Try it yourself
Open a document with a few paragraphs in it, or paste some text in.
The difference these settings make is only visible on real paragraphs, not a single line.
Press Ctrl and A, then type 14 into the font size box on Home and press Enter.
Everything grows at once. Typing the number is quicker and more precise than scrolling the list.
With everything still selected, click the line-spacing button and choose 1.5.
This is usually the single biggest improvement in comfort. Notice the page count rise — the words did not change, they just have room now.
Go to the Layout tab, click Margins, and choose Narrow.
Margins are the white border around the page. Narrower margins fit more of your larger text per page, which offsets the extra length.
Drag the zoom slider at the bottom-right to 150%, then set it back to 100%.
Zoom made the text look bigger on screen without changing the document at all — a useful trick, but not the same job as font size.
Words people use
Check yourself
If you can say yes to each of these, you are ready for the next lesson.
- I can select the whole document with Ctrl+A before formatting
- I can set font size by typing a number into the size box
- I can change line spacing to 1.5 to open up a dense page
- I know zoom changes my screen only, and font size changes the print