- [Instructor] In this video,
we will use page breaks and section breaks
to significantly clean up the organization of our document.
These breaks are more helpful on longer documents,
especially when there are clear sections
that you need to keep separate.
Now, first, I want to go to the home ribbon
and I want to turn on my non printing characters.
This is not absolutely required,
but it does help us visualize what we're doing here.
And of course this particular non printing character
lets me know when the writer hit the return key
to start a new paragraph.
Okay, so next I want to scroll down in my document,
and I want to find this section about this maker's conference.
And I can see this just picks up in the middle of a page.
There's really no separation between this topic
and the topic that came before it in the document.
And there's a way to fix this that I often see people do,
but I'm only pointing this out as the wrong way to do it.
Some people would place their cursor
at the end of this paragraph,
and then hit the return key a bunch of times
until it pushes that next thing down to the next page.
But I only wanted you to see this,
so you know what's wrong with it.
Since we have our non printing characters visible,
we can actually see each new paragraph
and while this might look okay now,
if I were to edit anything above this,
if I were to add more text or remove some texts,
everything below this is going to shift
and I'll find myself constantly adding
or removing paragraph breaks every time I make a change.
So there's a much better way to do this.
So first, I want to actually delete
all of these unnecessary paragraphs,
and we'll start again from here.
I want to make sure I place my cursor
at the end of the previous paragraph,
then I'll go to the layout ribbon.
I'll go to breaks and you can see there are page breaks
and section breaks.
We're going to start with a basic page break.
When I click on that, you can see I have the page break
right here and everything below it
has been pushed down to the next page.
And since I have my non printing characters visible,
you can see I ended up with an extra paragraph line there,
but I can very easily delete that.
So now even if I were to go back up here
and add like five new pages worth of text
above this page break,
everything below the page break
would still be pushed down to the next available page.
And don't worry, this page break label
that we see right here is only there
because we have the non printing characters enabled.
Remember, at any time you can go to the home ribbon
and turn off the non printing characters,
and this is how your document would look normally,
but I'm going to turn that back on so we can visualize this.
Okay, so that's a page break,
but there are also section breaks.
To understand the difference,
first, I want to preview something
that we're really going to cover in another video.
I want to set up columns,
so scrolling down, I want to go to this page here,
and what I'm going to do is just click somewhere on this page,
and I want to set this up for a two column layout.
With my cursor on this page,
I can go to the layout ribbon
and then I'll go to columns,
and I'm going to switch this to two columns.
And this might look okay here, but I've got a problem.
It did not just set the two column layout for that one page,
it set the two column layout for the entire document.
So how do you fix this?
Well, what you need to do
is break your document into sections,
then you can apply layout settings like column settings
differently in those different sections.
And yes, we did do a page break before,
but those do not count as separate sections,
that's why we need section breaks.
So first I'll click the undo button
in the quick access toolbar to undo that,
everything is back to that single column layout.
Then I want to go to the page that we're looking for.
I'm going to click the line above this line
with the black shading, everything below this
will be in another section, so I'll click above that line,
then I'll go to the layout ribbon, then to breaks.
This time I want to do a section break
and you can see there's a few options,
but I'm going to choose just the normal section break
that pushes everything down to the next page.
So when I click on that,
now I can see this section break here
and everything below that is considered a new section
and it's also pushed down to another page, so it looks nice.
Now, once again, you can see
I ended up with an extra paragraph space there,
but with my non printing characters,
I can easily see it and I can easily delete it.
So now that this is considered
a completely different section,
now I'll place my cursor on that page.
I'll go to the layout ribbon,
I'll go to columns
and let's set it up as a three column layout this time.
I'll select that and I think this looks pretty good
for this section.
And of course, everything above the section break
is still in that single column layout.
So try to keep your longer documents organized,
not by adding empty paragraph lines, but by using breaks.