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Making your resume look great is half the battle. Last week I covered headers, columns and date format. Here are three more formatting tips for your resume!

1. Margins

How big or small should your margins be? You might have default margins set to 1.0 on top and bottom, and 1.25 on left and right. These are huge margins for a resume. If you really need to fill up space then use 1.0” margins all around. Otherwise, here’s what I recommend:

a. Top Margin: 0.5” is a nice small margin that looks good above the nice header you created with our first formatting tip.

b. Bottom Margin: It’s best if it’s just a little bigger than the top margin. Try 0.6”.

c. Left/Right: These should be the same. Try not to go below 0.8” for your left and right margins, as it starts to look like you’re really trying to squeeze things in.

2. Spacing

Can’t get rid of that one line that goes to the second (or third) page of your resume? Don’t want your resume to look squashed together? Here’s one trick that can help fit your resume into the allotted space and create coveted “white space” at the same time.

Take a look at your resume format. You might have a full line of space between sections that you just don’t need. Thankfully, there’s another option that can make just enough difference to get your resume back onto one page (or two).

1. Delete the unwanted full space between lines.

2. Put your cursor on the line above which you want to insert space.

3. Go to the Paragraph menu, Indents and Spacing submenu.

4. Under Spacing, you’ll see a Before box and After box. In the appropriate box (in this case it would be “Before”) hit the arrow until it says “6pt.” That will insert space above the line – a narrower space than you had there before. (You can also insert 3pt or 12pt of space, but most common will be 6pt.)

You can use this trick not just between sections but also to create a little space under your headings. For example, here’s what 6pt of space looks like:

EDUCATION

New York University School of Law, New York, NY

Play around with this feature and you’ll find you have a lot more flexibility around spacing on your resume!

3. Print Out Your Resume!!

It might sound radical to use an actual printer and paper, but I mean this. Print out your resume to make sure the margins and the format in general look good! It’s likely that you’ll spot something you wouldn’t have noticed on a computer screen.