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
- 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).
- Type out “1234567890” at the top, using the default font of 11-point Calibri.
- Copy “1234567890” and paste enough times across the top until you get close to your number.
- 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
- If your horizontal ruler isn’t visible, click the “View” tab, go to the “Show” section, and check the “Ruler” box.
- This video shows that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWQqbe7vkWM
- 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”.
- 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.
- Then move the double-arrow slowly back until that character goes back to the top line.
- This video shows how to move margins this way: https://youtu.be/CUkvPt50bOE?t=104
- You have the right width! Save this document for future use. I call mine “54-character width”.
- Type away or copy-and-paste content to fit it to your desired width.
- 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.
- Choose your character width. I am now doing 54 characters.
- Type out “1234567890” at the top, using the default font of Normal text 11-point Arial..
- Copy “1234567890” and paste enough times across the top until you get close to your number.
- 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
- If your horizontal ruler isn’t visible, click the “View” tab, then click “Show Ruler”.
- If your ruler doesn’t have measuring lines on it, go to the top menu and choose “Format” then “Switch to Pages Format”.
- Find the blue “Right margin” marker on the right side of the top ruler.
- Hover over it until it shows a double-arrow pointing left and right. This is the “Right Margin”.
- 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.
- This should cause the last character to drop to the next line.
- Now click and drag that double-arrow “Right Margin” to the right, one character and release.
- The character should go back to the top line.
- You have the right width! Save this document for future use. I call mine “54-character width”.
- Type away or copy-and-paste content to fit it to your desired width.
- Copy from Google Docs and paste into your email program (or wherever else you like).