While I was doing my usual setup for editing, I wondered whether other people knew about the usefulness of Draft view for documents you are not editing. If you follow the instructions in this post, it displays in a monospaced font like the old typewriter fonts (usually Courier), and makes the text wrap to fit the window, no matter what size the window is. (‘Wrapping’ means the text automatically continues on a new line when it reaches the right edge of your window.) Draft view also saves space by hiding headers, footers and figures. Let me explain how I set it up.
I work with Microsoft 365 and Windows 11 on a PC and I have two monitors (but this function is just as effective when working on a single screen). One monitor has my main text in Print Layout view, full screen. The second screen has my reference documents in Draft view, snapped to left and right (snapping is a useful Microsoft function that allows you to arrange several windows on one screen, according to predefined regions or layouts, for example, one above the other or left and right). These reference documents might be my style sheet and any guidelines the client has provided. For example, one of my clients likes me to put comments in a separate list. However, the text in the two documents side by side on the second screen is too wide for their windows (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Two windows in Print Layout view. (See how text on the right in both documents is cut off. The left-hand one is in Bookman Old font and the right-hand one is in Arial.)
Setting up Draft view
To set your Draft view like mine, go to File > Options > Advanced (the dialog box shown in Figure 2), scroll down to Show document content, and make sure that ‘Show text wrapped within the document window’ is ticked for each document (it doesn’t wrap in Print layout view). Lower down, you can enable and change the Draft display font. At the bottom of the section, you can set the Style area pane width to see the name of each paragraph’s style. Mine is set to 0,5 cm because I don’t need to know the style names now so, in Figure 5, only the ‘No’ of the ‘Normal’ and the ‘He’ of the ‘Heading’ style names show on the left of each document window.
Figure 2. Set Word Options for Draft view
Making the text fit the window/s
With both reference documents open, I do the following:
- Select the View tab in the top ribbon.
- In the Windows group, select View Side by Side. (If you have more than two Word windows open, you will be presented with a list of other documents and asked which document you would like to open in side-by-side view.)
- Synchronous Scrolling will be enabled by default (the button will be shaded to show that the option is selected). Click Synchronous Scrolling to turn off this option (the button will no longer be shaded).
- Still in the View tab, select the Views group and then Draft. Figure3 shows what this step looks like on half my screen, with the groups scaled down (collapsed to drop-downs):
Figure 3. Select Draft view. (If you don’t set View Side by Side first, you have to select Draft view for each window in turn. With a single screen, you might keep one window in Print Layout and have all windows different widths.)
- Then go to the Zoom group and select the Zoom option. (You can also use the zoom slider at the bottom right of the screen.)
- Set the percentage. I like 120% (as shown in Figure4). It is applied to both windows at once if Side by Side view is set. Note that the zoomed text stays wrapped.
Figure 4. Set the zoom to 120%
For the screenshot below (Figure 5), I set the Zoom to 140% so you can see more clearly what a difference it makes to have a zoomed Draft view.
Figure 5. Two windows in Draft view with 140% zoom. Note: The font is only displayed as Courier. The documents keep their original font settings.
In closing, let me summarise why I find a zoomed Draft view useful:
- You can fit more windows on a screen and still read what is in them.
- The larger, monospaced font makes spaces and punctuation easier to see and errors easier to identify, without changing the original font in the document.
- The document moves a greater distance with each scroll of the mouse wheel, allowing you to move around your document more quickly .
In my next blog post, I will tell you why I hide headers and footers in the documents I am editing and scroll in two-page view when I do a print preview.
