We covered inserting a section break in a previous post and I promised to follow up with changing page orientation. There are many reasons why one might want to change the orientation in your documents and I think you will be happy to have learned about this. I keep my promises, so here we go!
Once you have inserted your section breaks into your document, you can now change the page orientation of any of your sections individually without affecting the layout of the other sections. You can now move your insertion point to a section and change the page orientation.
Follow the steps below to learn how:
Select the Layout tab and click Orientation, which will open a menu with two options: Portrait and Landscape.
Select Landscape.
The section you previously selected should appear in landscape now and the rest of your document should remain in portrait.
And that is how you use sections to change the orientation of the layout of your documents. This is a simple example of what you can accomplish with sections.
You will find that sometimes Word inserts section breaks automatically, without you even realizing it, which happens when you insert columns in your documents. Here is an example: Say you select any text in your document and then go to Layout | Columns | Two, Word will automatically create continuous section breaks before and after the the selected area. So, sometimes when adding certain formatting features in Word, you may not always be aware that Word is inserting sections for you. No big deal right? Well if you use section numbers and start to notice randomly that your numbering seems to be a bit off, this could be why. You may have used a feature in Word that has added a section break. This is why I always advise having your Show/Hide enabled so that you can see all formatting marks.
Go to File | Options | Display.
Changing page orientation is very useful indeed, especially when you are using charts or tables that do not quite fit in portrait mode.
But still and all, you most likely will not be using this formatting as frequently as numbering sections and pages. And that, right there, will be the next post, so stay tuned!
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