Previewing and Printing a Document

When you are ready to print a document, you can click the Microsoft Office Button, point to Print, and then click Quick Print. Word then uses your computer's default printer and the settings specified in the Print dialog box. To use a different printer or change the print settings, you click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Print to open the Print dialog box. You can then specify which printer to use, what to print, and how many copies, and you can make other changes to the settings.

Before you print a document, you almost always want to check how it will look on paper by previewing it. Previewing is essential for multi-page documents but is helpful even for one-page documents. To preview a document, you click the Microsoft Office Button, point to Print, and then click Print Preview. This view shows exactly how each page of the document will look when printed. Word displays a Print Preview tab on the Ribbon to provide tools for checking each page and making adjustments if you don't like what you see.

By using the buttons in the Page Setup group on the Print Preview tab, you can make the following changes:

• Change the margins of the document to fit more or less information on a page or to control where the information appears. You define the size of the top, bottom, left, and right margins by clicking the Margins button and making a selection from the Margins gallery, or by clicking Custom Margins and specifying settings on the Margins tab of the Page Setup dialog box.
  
  
  
  
• Switch the orientation (the direction in which a page is laid out on the paper). The default orientation is portrait, in which the page is taller than it is wide. You can set the orientation to landscape, in which the page is wider than it is tall, by clicking the Orientation button and selecting that option.
  The pages of a document all have the same margins and are oriented the same way unless you divide your document into sections. Then each section can have independent margin and orientation settings.
• Select the paper size you want to use by clicking the Size button and making a selection in the Paper Size gallery.

You can click buttons in other groups to change the printer options, change the view of the document, and change the mouse pointer so that you can edit the text.