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McCombs Office Solutions and Tips

Default to Draft View in Word 2007

March 13th, 2009 · Office 2007 · Word · Posted by Holly Green

The default view in Word 2007 is Print Layout, but I’ve heard from several people who prefer to work in Draft view.  Changing the default view to Draft view is a two step process.

First, enable a document to be opened in Draft view.

  1. Close all but one of your Word documents.
  2. In Word, click on the Office button.
  3. Click on Word Options, located in the bottom right corner of the menu.
  4. Select Advanced in the left column.
  5. Scroll down to the General section (near the bottom) and check the box that says Allow opening a document in Draft view.
  6. Click OK.

Second, change your Word document to Draft view and close it.  You should only have one Word document open.

  1. Click on the View tab.
  2. Click on the Draft view button.
  3. Save changes if necessary.
  4. Close the document.

The next time you open a Word document, it should open in Draft view.

3 responses so far



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  • 1 saidra // Jun 7, 2009 at 10:22 pm

    can someone explain why half a page is blank and you can’t write on it in the draft view?

  • 2 Holly Green // Jun 11, 2009 at 2:36 pm

    Hi Saidra,
    In Draft view your work space (the space between the margins of your page) is smooshed over to the left, leaving the right side empty (you can see this by looking at the ruler above the page). However, you can display text across the whole screen in Draft view. In 2007, click on the Office button, click on the Word Options button at the bottom right. In the left column of the Word Options dialog box, click on Advanced. Scroll down to the “Show document content” section and check the box for “Show text wrapped within the document window”. Click OK.
    If you’re using 2003 (Normal view in 2003 is the same as Draft view in 2007), go to Tools > Options. Select the View tab. Under “Outline and Normal options” at the bottom check the “Wrap to window” box and click OK.
    This will maximize the text shown on the screen, but will not give you a good idea of what a printed page will look like.

  • 3 Joe // Nov 15, 2009 at 10:18 am

    Thank you for this. That was really helpful. It’s been driving me nuts that word opened in that print view. Stupid of MS not to allow for a default setting for that, as they have for fonts and alignment.

    Thanks for taking the time to help people out with this.

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