This post has nothing to do with getting papers ready for IEEE, it is just using the template they provide for something else, like a University coursework.

IEEEtran_HOWTO says:

Authors should not attempt to manually alter the margins, paper size …

But sometimes one just has to. And then using packages like ‘geometry’ does not help – they confilict with IEEE settings and mess up the entire layout.

I use a4paper option. IEEETran was designed for Letter paper. To make things compatible the desginers made it so the layout will look exactly the same if one used A4 or Letter.

This is great, unless you want only A4 – then the paper has a huge bottom page margin. Which is not birlliant if you have a page limit and is already over it.

Fixing this appeared to be quite easy. Just add:

\newcommand{\CLASSINPUTtoptextmargin}{2cm}
\newcommand{\CLASSINPUTbottomtextmargin}{2cm}
\documentclass[journal, a4paper]{IEEEtran}
.....
\begin{document}
.....
\end{document}

Inspired by this FAQ