Columns and Breaks

If you have ever seen an internal newsletter, many times it is set in columns, much like a newspaper. You can do the same thing to documents in Microsoft Word by converting your document to columns. The Columns button will allow you to set columns for your document. The maximum amount allowed is 12. Here is what happens when we make our document two columns.

You can set the spacing of the columns by using the Format|Columns menu.

Inserting Breaks

It would probablylook better if the title of our document was stretched across the top of the page. In order to do this, we should insert SECTION BREAKS into the document. These allow you to set different page formats for different parts of the same page. To accomplish this, we can place our insertion point right before the introduction paragraph and go to the Insert|Break menu.

We can then choose a Continuous break, which will place the break right at the insertion point. The other three types of section breaks will create new pages.

Here is the result after we go into the top section and change our title to one column only. (We also centered the title and made it a larger font for emphasis.)

You can also create column breaks, which will push text from one column to the next column. We will place a column break at the start of the Eastern Region section. This way, the paragraph doesn't break off in the middle. Here is the result.