Suppose you are writing a document in Word 2010 and you are aiming to get the whole thing on one page. Often, you’ll end up with a lone sentence or two on an extra page. What a waste of good space. Wouldn’t it be good if you could reduce the document in size just enough for it to fit on one page? This is precisely what the Shrink To Fit command does. Shrink To Fit will reduce the font size to the point where the document fits on one less page than it used to. Be careful that the font size doesn’t become too small to read, though.
The only problem is that Word 2010 has hidden this command!
To use this command, you will have to add it to either the Quick Access Toolbar or the Ribbon itself. Personally, for something like this I would prefer to add it to the Ribbon. It’s very easy to clutter up the Quick Access Toolbar if you are not careful.
Add Shrink To Fit To The Ribbon
To add the Shrink To Fit command to the ribbon, you first need to create a new group for it to be placed in. Click the File Tab > Options > Customize Ribbon.
Let’s work backwards: to the right of the window you can see a list of tabs that already exist in the ribbon. Within each tab is a selection of groups and within each group is a set of commands. You can expand and collapse tabs and groups by clicking on the ‘+’ or ‘-‘ signs.What you see in this list is the current setup of the ribbon.
We’re going to create a new group to put the Shrink To Fit command in, so first of all look over on the right and select a tab for the group to appear in. I’m going to select the Page Layout tab but you can choose a different one if you prefer. Click the New Group button and a new group will be created at the end of the selected tab. The new group is called New Group (Custom), but we can rename it by clicking the Rename button. Call it something like “Printing”. If you decide that you no longer need this group, you can always get rid of it by selecting it and clicking Remove (between the list of commands on the left and the tabs/groups on the right).
Over on the left is a list of all the commands that you can add to the ribbon. You’ll need to change the drop down list selection at the top to be All Commands to see the Shrink To Fit command. Click anywhere in the list and then press ‘S’ to get a bit further down the list quickly. Scroll down to find Shrink One Page (it’s not called Shrink To Fit) and then select it. When you click the Add button, the command will be added to the new Printing group you just created.
Click OK. The new group will now appear in the Page Layout tab.
Now when you need to shrink to fit, you can simply click this button.