Booklets are double-sized printouts where the sheets can be fold in half and stapled together to make it flip like a book, an A5 size book to be precise. Think newspaper if you are not sure. Assuming you have an 8 page document, the following will show the page arrangement of a booklet.
Sheet 1 Side 1 – Page 8 & Page 1
Sheet 1 Side 2 – Page 2 & Page 7
Sheet 2 Side 1 – Page 3 & Page 6
Sheet 2 Side 2 – Page 4 & Page 5
Microsoft Word (2011) for Mac does not print a booklet directly. It does print 2 pages per sheet on both sides. But it is different from a booklet. For the same document as above, the page arrangement will be
Sheet 1 Side 1 – Page 1 & Page 2
Sheet 1 Side 2 – Page 3 & Page 4
Sheet 2 Side 1 – Page 5 & Page 6
Sheet 2 Side 2 – Page 4 & Page 8
It is strange that Microsoft has missed out such a useful feature as the booklet format is clearly useful in many situations. The good thing is there exists a simple workaround, which will take 2 stages. Here are the step by step guide.
- Create a Word document.
- Goto Print and find the PDF button at the bottom left corner.
- Click on the arrow to show its menu, and click on the second option is Save As PDF.
- After saving the file, open it in Acrobat.
- Goto File -> Print.
- Click on the Booklet button just about at the centre of the Print window. It should be in darker shade of grey.
- You can make some other adjustments before pressing the Print button.
That’s it. It is a straight forward workaround. For more information of the setting on Acrobat, click here to see the guide from Adobe.