How to Preview a Document Before Printing in Word 2016

Word 2010 For Dummies

Before you print, preview the look of the final document in Word 2016. Yeah, even though your document is supposed to look the same on the screen as it does on paper, you may still see surprises: missing page numbers, blank pages, screwy headers, and other jaw-dropping blunders, for example.

Fortunately, a print preview of your document appears as part of the Print screen, as shown here.

The Print screen.

To preview your document, follow these steps:

Save your document.

Yep — always save. Saving before printing is a good idea.
Click the File tab.
Chose the Print item from the left side of the File screen.

The Print screen appears, similar to what's shown.
Use the buttons at the bottom of the screen to page through your document.

You can use the Zoom control (refer to the figure) to enlarge or reduce the image. Look at the margins. If you're using footnotes, headers, or footers, look at how they lay out. The idea is to spot anything that's dreadfully wrong before you print.

When you're ready, you can print the document. Basically you click the big Print button, labeled in the figure. Or when things need to be repaired, click the Back button to return to your document.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.