How to write a screenplay in Microsoft Word.

The format, in five numbers.

Screenplay format is not a style, it is a measuring instrument. One correctly formatted page is about one minute of screen time, and every producer, reader and first assistant director counts on that. Five numbers carry it.

1. Paper: US Letter, portrait. Europe uses A4 and nobody objects, as long as you stay on one of them for the whole script.
2. Font: Courier 12 pt. One weight. No bold, no italics, no colour. Courier Prime is free, it is the same width as Courier, and it reads better.
3. Line spacing: single, six lines per inch, which gives about 55 lines of text a page. This is the number that makes the page count true.
4. Margins: 1.5 in on the left (3.8 cm), 1 in on top, right and bottom (2.5 cm). The wide left margin exists so the script can be hole-punched and bound.
5. One blank line between elements. Never two. The blank line is part of the format, not decoration.

Everything else is six paragraph shapes, always in the same columns, measured from the left margin:

On the page, it looks like this:

The exact columns move by a fraction between studios and decades. What matters is that they never move inside your script.

Set up the page.

Open a blank document. Two minutes, once per script, and you can save it as a template afterwards.

1. Margins. Layout, then Margins, then Custom Margins. Top 1 in, Bottom 1 in, Right 1 in, Left 1.5 in. In centimetres: 2.5, 2.5, 2.5 and 3.8.
2. Paper size. Same dialog, Paper tab: Letter, or A4 if that is what you print on.
3. Font. Home, then the font box: Courier Prime if you have it, Courier New otherwise, size 12.
4. Page numbers. Insert, Page Number, Top of Page, right aligned. A screenplay numbers the page with a full stop after the figure, so type a period after the field. Then tick Different First Page, because page one is never numbered.
5. Turn off what Word adds on its own. In the paragraph settings, spacing before and after must be 0 pt and line spacing Single. Word's default adds 8 pt after every paragraph, which quietly ruins your page count.

Build the six styles.

This is the real work, and it is worth doing properly: a style is what makes every scene heading identical to the last, and what lets you change all of them at once. In Word, Home, then the small arrow at the corner of the Styles gallery, then New Style.

Create one style per element, named after it. For each one, open Format, then Paragraph, and set the left and right indents from the table above, line spacing Single, spacing before and after 0 pt.

The two settings that do the heavy lifting

• Style for following paragraph. In the New Style dialog, this dropdown decides what you get when you press Enter. Set Scene heading to be followed by Action, Character by Dialogue, Parenthetical by Dialogue, Dialogue by Action. That single field gives you a third of screenwriting software for free.
• All caps. In Format, then Font, tick All caps for Scene heading, Character and Transition. You type in lower case, Word shows capitals, and you never hold Shift again.

Give them keyboard shortcuts

On Windows, in the same New Style dialog: Format, then Shortcut Key. On Mac: Tools, then Customize Keyboard. Something you can hit without looking, like Command or Control with 1 to 6, in the order of the table above.

Save it as a template

File, Save as Template, and give it a name. Next script, you start from it instead of doing all of this again. Or skip the whole section and take our free template, which is the six styles above, already built, in Letter and A4.

What you still do by hand.

The setup above is honest work and it holds. These are the things it cannot do, and they are the reason screenwriting software exists at all.

The one-minute way.

We make an add-in that does all of the above inside Word, and then keeps doing it while you write. It installs in about a minute on Mac and on Windows, it is signed and notarized by Apple, and there is nothing to learn: you type, and each line takes its place.

• Type int. kitchen - night and press Enter: it is a scene heading, in capitals, in the right column.
• Press Tab in an action line: you are on a character name, centred, capitals coming by themselves.
• Press Enter after a character: you are in dialogue. Tab from there: a parenthetical, brackets already typed.
• Paste a draft from anywhere, or import a Final Draft, Fade In, Celtx or Fountain file, and press Format my document: every line gets its element.
• A side panel does the rest: title page, scene numbers, script stats, a table read with a different voice per character, a movie poster, a production breakdown, and exports to PDF, Fountain and Final Draft.

The file stays an ordinary .docx. The formatting lives in the document as Word styles, so anyone can open it, with or without the add-in, and it still reads like a screenplay.

Writing together, in Word.

Word does live co-writing, and most people who ask for it do not know it is there. Save the .docx in OneDrive or SharePoint, turn AutoSave on at the top left, and share the file. Everyone writes in the same script at once, with Word's own comments, suggestions and live cursors.

Each co-writer installs the add-in once to get the instant Enter and Tab. Someone who opens the file in Word for the web, without installing anything, still sees a correctly formatted screenplay and can write in it. The format is in the document, so it is right for everyone.