Creating a 2 column layout on the second page in Word
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Hi there, in this video, we're going to look at splitting our document into two columns, but not just-- that's easy enough, but we don't want to do it just on the first page, and all the pages, we want it to start later on, so we want to do this, where I've got my first page, and it's very different from my second, which is now two columns, so I want to do that. So, let's go and create two columns, but on the second page first.
The first thing we're going to do is we're going to add some more copy, we've only got text, we've only got one page, so we're going to add the text for the rest of the pages, so at the end here, I'm going to put in a 'return', I'm going to go to 'File', 'Open', and in our exercise files-- 'Browse', on our 'Desktop', 'Word Exercise Files'. If you haven't got them, check out the link on the screen here somewhere, there'll be a link to download these exercise files. Then we go, 'Newsletter', and there's 'Newsletter Text - Page 2 & 3'.
Open that up, select it all; to select it all is 'Control A', I'll do that, my shortcut, but you can just drag across it all and start sliding down. Grab it all, let's go to 'Copy', and let's close this down. What I'm going to do is, back at 'Home', there's a couple of options for 'Paste'; I'm going to use this last one here, 'Keep Text Only', so just plain old text.
Now, there's a couple of things I want to fix. I want to fix the margin, and I want to put this in two columns. Let's do the two columns first, because that's what we came for, right?
What I want to do first of all is, I want to push this, so it starts on the next page. So what we're going to do is, just in front, right at the beginning of this first heading I can go to 'Insert', and there's one in here called 'Page Break'. It just means that this-- Yes, it's going to break the page, and start down here. That's my first page, and now, this is the beginning of my second page.
Next thing I'd like to do is, split into two columns. So with the cursor in the page you want to adjust-- I don't want two columns in this first page, this is going to be the trick of this video. If you want it to be on all pages, just have the cursor in this first page as well. So I'm going to have it here, my second page, I'm going to go to 'Insert' tab, and-- Actually I'm going to go to 'Layout' tab, and then I'm going to go 'Columns', and I'm going to select 'Two'. Two will kind of give me what I want, but it's going to do it for every page. So I'll 'undo' that, using that little 'undo' option. Under 'Columns', go to 'More Columns', pick '2', and where it says 'Whole document', say 'This point forward'. It means that wherever your cusor is, and beyond.
Now I'm going to have this normal, one column, than this one here, which is two columns. And the only thing, you might not have done this giant red, sorry, giant margin on the right, like I have here, to allow the text box to fit, so I'm going to have to fix it by going into 'Layout', go to 'Margins', and I'm just going to pick 'Narrow'. Yes, it's going to work out.
So it's all kind of two columns, I got my margin sorted out, that is how to split it. Now, say you wanted to go back to one column here, just have the cursor in here, and go back to 'Columns', 'More Columns', and you can apply, say to 'Three' from this section, from 'This point forward', so two, three. I just want two, so I'm going to go 'undo', and that is how to split into two columns, but not doing it on the first page. You might skip the contents page, the inside cover page, and start on the fifth page, maybe, but the technique's the same.
All right, I'll see you in the next video.