How to add a page break and column break in Microsoft Word 2016
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.
In this video what we're going to do is we're going to insert our column breaks, it just means that headings are going to start on the right page, you can see, this one's been pushed down to start on the very next page instead of that kind of half straddling a page. Also, at the end here, we're going to design our home page, just techniques we've already used before, we're just going to squeeze that in here as well. Let's get on with it.
First of all, before we start putting in our column breaks, or our page breaks, we need to-- our documents are going to be 2-column layout, so with my cursor-- I've got a first page, I've got a contents page, where I'm going to put in all of that, and then I've got my first bit of text. I'm going to switch this to a 2-column. Go to 'Layout', click 'Columns', and click 'Two'. And if you're following along with this longer tutorial, that's going to work, you'll be fine. The reason it's not going to-- because by default it will try and change this first page as well, it will put that into two columns. The only reason it's not doing that is, in the previous tutorial, remember, we double clicked in the header here, and we said 'Link to Previous', and we turned that off, and we put in different sections, that's allowed us to do this without too much hassle.
If you're jumping into this video without doing the previous ones what you might have to do is, with your cursor here, and you go to 'Layout', 'Columns', and instead of clicking 'Two' go to 'More Columns', then pick 'Two' and say 'From this point forward', because I've got my cursor flashing in page 3, it's going to say-- it's going to two columns but only from this point onwards. Either way, we've got our 2-column layout for our document.
Now what I want to do is-- ours is not too bad, I had a quick little look through it, and what we're looking for is column break. See, this one here is about the worst. It starts here, and it's pretty much the end of the page. You can get more, say, points where-- there's no point having that start here, it would be easier to just push it to the next page. In our case I'm going to select this one here. Actually I'm just going to put my cursor just in front, then go to 'Layout’, there's one called 'Breaks', I'm looking at this one called 'Column' break. 'Page' break works just as well here, but 'Column', just because we're using columns we're using 'Column' breaks. It means it's going to push it to the next page, and then you just work your way through trying to figure out if there are any other bad paragraph starts or headings. The headings are actually okay, they’ll start at a reasonable place, but let's say this one here, see this paragraph? There's no reason that should be just two lines before it gets started, it would make more sense to insert a column break. That one, click on 'Column'. Just kind of push it through, just to align things up. It's called widowing or orphaning when you leave half a paragraph all by itself.
I'm going to scroll down, and just work my way through, and put in paragraph, and put in 'Column' breaks. As you add images and charts, and stuff like that, you're going to have to go and revisit this. Often I'll do this right at the end of the document as part of my final checks. Don't worry about it too much because there's too many text changes, and if I go through and something ruins off the text, so edit it down, you've got this nice big gap now where that paragraph could totally fit. So don't do this probably until the end.
One thing worth mentioning here as well before we move on is, if I go to 'View'-- we're dealing with so many pages here, this one's not too long, it's 11 pages long, but imagine you're dealing with 50 or 100, go to 'View', and we're going to turn on this one called 'Navigation Pane'. And what that helps me do is just kind of-- you can be on headings, pages, and pages I am normally on, so I know what page-- I can just kind of scroll down and click on page 11 rather than scroll down, or scroll up, or drag this little slider, it's quite easy to use this.
The other nice thing is, up in here, where we got headings, you can see, these are actually the headings from the documents, see 'Director's report'? If I click on 'Director's report', jumps to there, it jumps down to this page. Back up to 'Basis of opinion', it's a really nice way of navigating rather than often I’ll have that up. You can also hit the 'Search' option, and it will just kind of slide down to where you needed to be as well. I'll close it down for the moment though.
One last thing I'd like to do before we move on, this is just a bit of housekeeping, is that I want to style this home page here, or my title page. So I want to push this text down now. If I was being Dan the teacher, I'd say, definitely go in and make sure you're using 'Layouts'. make sure you use 'Margins', go to 'Custom Margins', put in the height that you want, and make sure it's for just this selection, so it doesn't do it for all the pages. So if I go in and put in-- or let's put in '5 inches'. Just going to push my margin down. You can do that, and that will work, I know everybody does that. I'm 'undo'ing, and I'll just put returns in. I know, you shouldn't do it this way, but that's the way everyone does it. I'm going to select text, go 'Home', I'm going to make this look bigger. Maybe you can skip along because this is just me messing about.
One other thing I want to do is I want to put a line above and below this thing, so I'm going to put in 'Bottom Border', and I'm going to put in 'Top Border', so I got a line above and below. I also want to play with the spaces underneath, I want to push this title down a bit, so I'm going to go into this option, I'm going to go to 'Line Spaces', I'm going to put the 'space after', and I'm going to set it to '25'. Just serves as a gap underneath. I'm going to select this as well. These lines are just too close to the title for my liking, so I'm going to go into these borders, go to 'Borders and Shading', and there's one here called 'Options'. We're going to set this to something like '15' at the top, '15' at the bottom. Click 'OK'. That's kind of how I want it to be.
Next thing I'd like to do is just select all of this, just the paragraph selected, you have something selected and you adjust your margins on the side here, you can see, it kind of just pushes it in, and it doesn't affect the rest of the document, he's fine. I like it enough.
Next thing I'm going to do is insert an image that's going to go just on this title page, we'll look at headers and footers in a little bit, so I'm going to go 'Insert', 'Image', I'm going to bring in from our files, under 'Desktop', '03 Long Document', there's 'Accountant Logo', bring him in, goes in the wrong spot, I'm going to grab him, and I'm going to say-- this option here, I'm going to say 'Behind Text'. Up here. Where's his anchor? I'm going to actually say 'Fix page position'. The anchor, I'm going to put just at the top there. We looked through the anchoring and all this kind of files-- text behind stuff earlier on. If you haven't done that, go and check it out. It's kind of how I want my page to be.
All right, that's it for this video. Let's go check out the next one.