Long documents can look great when you know the right way to use Section Breaks.
Video:
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Podcast:
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Video Transcript:
Hi. I’m Alia Vryens and I’m the Microsoft Word Wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator and this week we’re going to roll up our sleeves and talk about something that will take your Word skills to the next level. In Hot Tip #87 we talked about how to break up your document using Page Breaks. I said you should use Page Breaks wherever you can and avoid Section Breaks because they get a bit complicated.
Today, we’re going to delve a little way to when and why Section Breaks are actually a really good idea, but first, the reason why I said to avoid Section Breaks whenever you can is 9 times out of 10 when someone comes to me with a funky looking document (and by funky I mean smelling really bad), weird formatting hiccups have happened because of the Section Breaks. I’m not going to in to why this happens but just note if something strange is happening turn on your Paragraphs Mark’s button, (remember Hot Tip #86?) and investigate your Sections. But dont be scared, Section Breaks can actually really be a great tool.
Section Breaks basically allow you to set rules for that section of your document that are different to the rest of your pages. What do I mean by that? Say that you want to have one of the pages of your pages in landscape rather than in portrait. What you do is you put your cursor at the bottom of the last page that you want to keep in portrait and then insert a section break. You click anywhere on the next page, the one that you want to change to landscape. You to Page Layout in the ribbon at the top of your screen. Select Orientation and then Landscape. You’ll see it will flip that page but not the pages before it.
To change the rest of the document back to portrait you insert another section break at the bottom of the landscape page, click to the next page again and then change the orientation again. You’ll have one page in the middle of your document that is a different orientation to the rest. You can do the same thing if you need to change the margins on one page but you dont want them changed throughout the rest of your document. You isolate the page that you want to change like I said before by putting a section break before it and at the bottom of it then you make the changes that you make to that one page and it won’t affect the rest of your document.
Then finally, do you work with page numbers? If you’ve got a long document sometimes that will happen. Section breaks can reset page numbers to start from one again but they can also continue numbering from the previous section. I’m not going to go into lots of these in detail but it’s just something to keep in mind. If your page numbers are not doing what they should be doing section breaks could be the culprit. Just check Paragraph Marks, do you see any section breaks, and then investigate from there.
That’s my quick overview of what section breaks are good for and what to look for if something is not quite right in your document so that’s it. Leave me a comment with any questions you have or suggestions for other things you’d like me to go over. Make sure that you subscribe to our Hot Tips and check out our website at AuspiciousArtsIncubator.org.