How to fix an error setting the bottom margin in Word 16

It’s always the little things…

If you keep getting an error message when you try to set the bottom margin of your Word document below a certain measurement… disconnect your printer.

Yes, that’s right, disconnect the printer, and not just via the cable but from Windows as well.

For those using Windows 7:

1. Click the Start button,
2. Select ‘Devices and Printers’

This will display the ‘Devices and Printers’ window. Under ‘Printers and Faxes’, you will see your printer. It will have a bright green tick next to it to show it’s the default device.

1. Click your printer
2. Select ‘Remove this Device’

Now when you open Word and set the margins to the lowest pre-set measurement [1.27 cm or 0.5 inches], Word will do your bidding without bitching and going “Nah ah, not gonna happen.”

This may seem like a drastic ‘fix’, but printers are ‘plug and play’ so Windows will re-install them again without issue.

Now, why on earth would you need to completely disconnect the printer in the first place?

The reason is that Word takes the dimensions for the ‘printable’ area of a page from the printer.

This is not a problem for most Word documents, but it can be a huge problem if the printer you want to use is CreateSpace. Or, to be more exact, if you want to set non-standard margins for the book you want CreateSpace to print for you.

This is exactly the problem that’s been vexing me for days. Printing in colour is expensive so I didn’t want to waste precious page space on unnecessarily wide margins. But do you think Word would co-operate? It allowed me to set all the margins to 1.27 cm, except for one. For some reason I could not fathom, Word kept telling me that the bottom margin had to be a minimum of 1.68 cm. For my US friends, that’s 0.66 inches.

I have wasted hours of my life searching Google for an answer, and it was not until I remembered a problem we had with Word at DVLC [the community centre where I help teach computer literacy to adults] that I began to wonder if I was experiencing something similar. At DVLC, there are multiple printers, but the student workstations are not allowed to access all of them. If the wrong printer is specified for a given workstation, Word chucks a wobbly and won’t even show a print preview.

So, could the printer be the problem?

Step 1 was to disconnect the printer cable from the pc.

Success? No.

Step 2 was to get stubborn and uninstall the printer from the pc.

Success? YES!

So there you have it, a simple solution for a rare problem. You’re welcome.

cheers

Meeks