Image of a wide-winged condor and a cat by Christel SAGNIEZ from Pixabay. Don’t make your emails this wide!

Easily set email widths with Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

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Ah the life of an ontrepreneur (online entrepreneur)! Things won’t always work. You need a backup plan.

I was set to convert my blog post into an email of 54 characters wide. I copied my text and went to load my word wrapper site and it wouldn’t load!

Back on February 1st, 2024, I revealed an easy way to format your email width with this nifty website: https://word-wrap.net/go/. But the site was down yesterday when I needed it.

(blog post “How wide should your marketing emails be?” https://www.charlespolanski.com/2024/02/01/how-wide-should-your-marketing-emails-be/)

Thankfully it’s back up now but I had to scramble and find a new way to narrow my email text. I learned about that site via the  John Thornhill Ambassador program.

I tried searching the web. I found similar sites but they would garble up my text with some lines only having a couple characters of text. Uggh!

I figured, “What about Microsoft Word!” There’s gotta be a way to narrow the width to a set amount of characters. But no, there wasn’t.

But you can indent the left and right margins easily by dragging them. So here’s a way to set a character width in Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word Width Setup

  1. Choose your character width. I am now doing 54 characters (I changed from 42, after seeing what my mentors are currently doing…more on that in tomorrow’s blog post).
  2. Type out “1234567890” at the top, using the default font of 11-point Calibri. 
  3. Copy “1234567890” and paste enough times across the top until you get close to your number. 
  4. For me it is pasting 4 times to get to 50 characters and the manually adding “1234” at the end to get to 54 characters: 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234
  5. If your horizontal ruler isn’t visible, click the “View” tab, go to the “Show” section, and check the “Ruler” box. 
    1. This video shows that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWQqbe7vkWM 
  6. Hover over the right end of the ruler with a marker until you get a double-arrow pointing left and right, called the “Right margin”. 
  7. Click and hold that double-arrow and drag it to the left, just far enough that your final character is pushed to the next line down. 
  8. Then move the double-arrow slowly back until that character goes back to the top line. 
    1. This video shows how to move margins this way: https://youtu.be/CUkvPt50bOE?t=104 
  9. You have the right width! Save this document for future use. I call mine “54-character width”.
  10. Type away or copy-and-paste content to fit it to your desired width.
  11. Copy from Word and paste into your email program (or wherever else you like).

Google Docs Width Setup

Google Docs allows for something very similar.

  1. Choose your character width. I am now doing 54 characters.
  2. Type out “1234567890” at the top, using the default font of Normal text 11-point Arial.. 
  3. Copy “1234567890” and paste enough times across the top until you get close to your number. 
  4. For me it is pasting 4 times to get to 50 characters and the manually adding “1234” at the end to get to 54 characters: 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234
  5. If your horizontal ruler isn’t visible, click the “View” tab, then click  “Show Ruler”.
  6. If your ruler doesn’t have measuring lines on it, go to the top menu and choose “Format” then “Switch to Pages Format”.
  7. Find the blue “Right margin” marker on the right side of the top ruler. 
  8. Hover over it until it shows a double-arrow pointing left and right. This is the “Right Margin”. 
  9. Click and hold and drag this double-arrow left just far enough that it’s just left of the final character and release your mouse click. 
    1. This should cause the last character to drop to the next line.
  10. Now click and drag that double-arrow “Right Margin” to the right, one character and release. 
    1. The character should go back to the top line.
  11. You have the right width! Save this document for future use. I call mine “54-character width”.
  12. Type away or copy-and-paste content to fit it to your desired width.
  13. Copy from Google Docs and paste into your email program (or wherever else you like).
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