Bear with me here, Pat. I'm still trying to find my way around this
blasted "menu ribbon" that MS Office uses now. (The startup guide
acknowledged that many people would find it difficult at first to use
the menu ribbon. Downloadable tutorials are provided for each Office
component. Also provided is a link to a video explaining "Why we made
this change" -- the video file did not run.)
Opening the Word component, I see an empty page. Selecting the Page
Layout ribbon, I see settings for indents given in centimeters. The
Margins tab provides several options (as well as a chance to customize
the settings) and one of those is "boxed"; I thus assume that this is
the current setting: top, bottom, and both sides = 25.4 cm. One choice
is for Office 2003 Default settings: top and bottom = 25.4 cm, sides =
3.18 cm.
I will change these to my personal preferences of 2.00 cm all around (or
2.5 cm on recto pages and 1.5 cm on verso pages to allow for punching or
binding). For those who are up on typography...yes, this provides a line
that is generally considered as being "too long" when 12 point type is
used on U.S. Letter paper. I will try once again, now that I have a new
computer not cluttered with personal stuff, to build a nice LaTeX suite;
I miss that from my Linux days. Sigh.
When I stumbled across the "preferences" menu yesterday, I saw that the
program was already set up in centimeters (capitalized), but that I had
the option to change that to inches, millimeters, or picas (all
capitalized).
I was able to figure out how to make vertical and horizontal rulers
visible and did so. They obviously are marked in centimeters but with
subdivisions for 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 cm. (Unfortunately, OpenOffice 3.3.0
does the same thing.)
Jim
On 2011-05-27 2246, Pat Naughtin wrote:
On 2011/05/27, at 11:32 , James R. Frysinger wrote:
I'm in the process of setting up a new computer for my business and discovered something surprising. While
setting options in the subject-named program on this Windows 7 OS, I discovered that "centimeter"
is the default value under "Display" for "Show measurements in units of:".
That's the first office program I've seen that defaults to metric! I cannot
think of anything I set in the Windows 7 preferences that would have caused
that.
Jim
Dear Jim,
What are the default settings on your new computer for page margins?
I use the latest (2011) version of Microsoft Word for Mac and it's default
settings all came in inches. After I set my preferred length setting for
millimetres, MS Word changed the page margin defaults to 25.4 mm top and bottom
and 31.8 mm for right and left margins.
You may recall that I have written a short article about this issue previously
at http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/PageBordersInchesORmillimetres.pdf
By the way, does your new MS Word allow you to set your own default in
millimetres? Or are you stuck with a choice between inches or centimetres?
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin LCAMS
Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, see
http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html
Hear Pat speak at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lshRAPvPZY
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped
thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern metric
system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save thousands each
year when buying, processing, or selling for their businesses. Pat provides
services and resources for many different trades, crafts, and professions for
commercial, industrial and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and
in the USA. Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA,
NIST, and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See
http://www.metricationmatters.com for more metrication information, contact Pat
at [email protected] or to get the free 'Metrication matters'
newsletter go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe.
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
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