Multi-Page Print Preview

Print Preview allows you to view exactly what your document will look like before you print it. This saves both time and paper. How Print Preview works depends on the version of Word you are using.

When you display Print Preview in Word 2007, you'll notice at the top of the screen, in the Zoom group, buttons for one page and two pages. Either of these can be used to display the specified number of pages. If you want to display a larger number of pages, click the Zoom button and then click Many Pages.

If you click on the Many Pages button the display changes to show more than one page from your document at a time. When you first click on the tool, you can select multiple pages to be viewed. The more pages you choose to view, the smaller each individual page appears on the screen.

If you want to select more than six pages in your preview, click on the Many Pages button, then click and hold on one of the pages shown in the drop-down area. Drag the mouse toward the right, and down, and you can pick a larger number of pages. As you drag the mouse, you can see the number of pages (divided into rows and columns) enumerated at the bottom of the page selector area. You can pick up to 7 x 13 pages (seven rows of thirteen pages per row), which is 91 pages on the screen at once. When you have selected a number of pages you want, simply release the mouse button.

If you again want to display only a single print-preview page, click on the One Page button and your display is returned to normal.

If you are using Word 2010 then you can essentially ignore everything up to this point. There is no intrinsic Print Preview command in Word 2010. Instead, you can see a representation of your document (sort of like Print Preview) when you display the print options. To display these options, just press Ctrl+P. To the right of the print options is Word's representation of what your document will look like when printed. If you want to see multiple pages, adjust the settings on the Zoom control at the bottom-right of the screen. Drag the Zoom control to the left, and Word shrinks each page and fits more of them on the screen; drag it to the right and the opposite happens. If you want to return to a single-page display, click the Zoom to Page tool, which is in the bottom-right corner, just to the right of the Zoom control.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (6001) applies to Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Multi-Page Print Preview.