Columns In Word
In the last edition, we talked about using Word
tables to clean up tab-delimited text. The benefit is that text in one cell of a
table stays within the boundaries of that cell. Tab-delimited text is free to
flow all over the page and when edited, the text will not retain the carefully created
formatting.
There is one other option in Word to consider. If your text has only
columns and no rows—like a newspaper story or magazine article, use columns,
not tables.
Columns can be set up for an entire document, or they can be used in only one
section. In other words, if you are writing a document which has ‘normal’
formatting at the beginning and end and columns in the middle, you can set up
multiple column formatting for just the center section.
To set up columns, go to the Format menu and choose Columns or click on the
Columns icon. You should see the dialog box below.
Here you can set your document to have the number of columns you want. Be
careful with too many columns as the space between columns can eat up a lot of
space on the page.If you shrink the spacing between columns, you should add a line between
columns to enhance readability as shown in the graphic.
Also note that here is where you choose to apply the column formatting to one
particular section, or to the Whole document. In the graphic we have chosen to
format the Whole document
If you want to format only one section, you need to explicitly create
separate sections. This is done in a Word document by adding section breaks.
Go to the Insert menu and choose Break… You’ll notice that there are many
types of Section breaks to choose from. The most common is continuous. This
means that no visible break is seen in the finished document. The other types of
section breaks force the text onto the next page, the next even page, or the
next odd page. Once you have more than one section, you can format each with
whatever column formatting you like.
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