Narrow Your Margins, Save a Tree

My colleague Eric Husk here at TechSoup signs his messages with the Margaret Mead quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

One great example of that is Tamara Krinsky's one-woman campaign to get everyone to do one simple little thing to make a big impact on the environment: to narrow the margins on all your documents to reduce paper use. Her campaign is aptly enough called Change the Margins. The campaign goal is to convince Microsoft to change the default margin settings in Microsoft Word to .75 inches on all sides, persuade five corporations to officially sanction narrower margins, and challenge five universities to adopt narrower margin settings.

On her Web site, she cites some Pennsylvania State University research that finds that that a single university could save 72 acres of forest and over $120,000 per year by reducing the default margin settings campus-wide. More specifically, reducing margins to .75" on all sides results in a total reduction of paper by 4.75%. Narrowing default margins on a ton of paper saves 19 reams of paper, which saves 1.14 trees (find an analysis of these stats at www.changethemargins.com then click on "Stats: How Much Will I Really Save?")

Unfortunately changing default margins is different in various versions of word processors. One easy way to deal with this is to use the Internet search term: 'change default margins on (name of your word processing application)'. Here are a few of the major ones:

• Microsoft Word 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2003 or here as well
• Microsoft Excel (not a word processor, but it does use lots of paper)
• Office 2008 for Mac
• AppleWorks (PDF)
• Open Office or here as well
• Google Docs

Better yet, think twice before printing any of them and read and edit the documents electronically!