How to Override Printer Margins
By John Granby
Printers often come with preprogrammed limits on margins, which limits the effective print area of a document. For most applications, such as some documents, this is not an issue. However, if you are creating a document such as a pamphlet or other marketing material for your business, the predefined margins may not work well for your purposes. On some printers, you can expand the print area by adjusting the margin limits in the software's printing dialog box. However, without a specialized printer, there may always be some small amount of margin which you cannot access.
Launch Microsoft Word and open your document.
Click "Page Layout," followed by "Margins," and then "Custom Margins."
Enter your desired margins in the Top, Bottom, Left and Right boxes, and then click "OK."
Click "File," and then "Print" to print your document. If any of the content of your document falls outside the printer's limits, which is set in the printer driver, you see an error message stating the margins are outside the printable area of the page. Click "Yes" on this dialog box to proceed with the printing.
Look closely at the printed document. If you still see some white area around the border of the page, this indicates the printer itself has a limit which you cannot override. If your final printable material cannot have this margin, then bring your document to a professional printing company.
Tips
The same general steps apply to standard Microsoft Office 2010 applications. The steps may be slightly different for page setup between each application; however, you can still define a custom margin in each of these applications.
Warnings
Changing margins with custom values within the Microsoft Office application will appear to give you success on the screen -- the application will visually show you the result of reduced margins. However, when you attempt to print this document, the printer itself may cut off some text or graphics that is outside its own printable area.
References
Writer Bio
John Granby began his writing career in 2000 as a founding member of a tech industry website targeted at WAP developers. He has provided in-depth coverage of the wireless industry, served as a speaker at several conferences and authored a book on Bluetooth. Granby earned a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering from Purdue University.