6. Page Layout

Making effective use of margins, header and footer!  

There are three main areas of the page layout, besides the obvious report taking most of the space, that we are interested in:

• Margins
• Header
• Footer

For the margins, keep a sufficient amount to give a clean look to your pages. If your report is to be solely consulted online, you can ignore the gutter. However, if your report it to be printed and bound, make use of the gutter and set it to a sensible value. In this case, you also need to think about single versus double sided printing. If you only print on one side of each sheet of paper, keep the gutter on the same side. However, for double sided printing (which has become the normal in both Colleges/Universities and Workplaces), you will need mirrored margins so that the gutter changes side.

The header is the space at the top of the page. This is a very convenient location to reiterate the title of your report, with potentially a College/University of Company logo in the outer corner of the page. This can be quite useful and help the reader identified what they are reading. For much longer reports, the header can alternate between the report title and the chapter/section title every other page.

The footer, at the very bottom of the page, should comprise two key elements. On the one hand, your name should feature to make your work clearly identifiable. On the other hand, a page number should appear. This is absolutely vital, in fact, it is so important it will be the subject of its own blog post. Note that the page number should always be on the outer edge of the page; therefore you need to use different footers for even and odd pages if the report is printed double sided to ensure the page number is always in the right place.