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How To Adjust Margins In OpenOffice, LibreOffice

My mother asked me to print up a birthday card with some dogs on it. I thought she said for my nephew, but it turned out to be for his dog. It had to happen. 🙂 I wrote before how I use OpenOffice Writer to create greeting cards.

Read here: How To Create Greeting Cards In OpenOffice

But one thing I don’t like is the wide border that this puts around the result. It makes centering the images very awkward to work with. My printer is supposed to support borderless printing, so I started searching for a way to fix this issue.

I went into OpenOffice to see if there were any settings there. I found the settings for adjusting the margins and that did the job. The following instructions work for both OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

Right-click on a blank page. In OpenOffice click on Page in the menu that opens. In LibreOffice, click on Page Style.

openoffice-libreoffice-page-style-options

Then click on the Page tab in either one. From here, the layout and instructions are identical.

openoffice-page-margin-settings

Look in the Margins section. In both OpenOffice and LibreOffice on my system, the default settings were all set to 2.00cm. So I tried first to set them all to 0.00cm. but when I clicked on OK, I got an error message that The margin settings are out of print range. Do you still want to apply these settings?. I clicked on No. If I set them to zero in LibreOffice, I get no error message.

margin-settings-out-of-range-error

Then I noticed OpenOffice had filled in the Margins with its own values: Left 0.30cm, Right 0.51cm, Top 0.63cm, and Bottom 0.64cm.

openoffice-new-margin-settings

So I left them at that and it worked. With most of the border gone, it made centering the images a lot easier.

birthday-card-final-result