- [Instructor] Making columns in a document
is a great way to set up a more organized layout.
Now, first I do want to go to my Home ribbon
and turn on the non-printing characters,
which will help us visualize what we're doing here.
Now, when you work with columns,
it's important to also work with section breaks,
which we introduced in another video.
With my non-printing characters enabled,
you can see I have a page break right here
and I have a section break here.
And this separates everything below this in another section,
which I've already set up in a three-column layout.
Okay, but let's go back to the top of the document,
and let's talk about the basics of making columns.
Generally, you can click to place your cursor on a page,
then go to the Layout ribbon,
then go to Columns, and then choose the layout you want.
I'll switch this to the two-column layout.
And what that does, is it sets my entire document
to be in that two-column layout.
Or to be more specific,
everything in the document until we hit a section break,
then everything after that can be a separate layout.
So I still have this three-column layout here.
Okay, so this two-column layout
actually does not look great for most of my document.
So let's hit the Undo button in the quick access toolbar
to undo that.
And what I'm going to do is scroll through my document
until I get to this quote here from Albert Einstein.
This is where I want that two-column layout to begin.
So what I need to do is separate that with a section break.
So I'm going to click on the end of the previous line,
I'll go to the Layout ribbon,
I'll go to Breaks,
and we're going to use a section break.
And I'm going to choose the type of section break
that pushes everything down to the next page.
So I'll select that.
And since I have my non-printing characters on,
you can see that section break here.
And then everything below that is a separate section.
And I've got an extra paragraph break there,
so I'm going to delete that.
So now that this page is in a separate section,
all I need to do is click somewhere on that page,
then I can go to the Layout ribbon, to Columns,
and choose a column layout here.
And let's get a little more interesting here.
I'm going to go to where it says More Columns.
And I like this layout
where the left column is a little more narrow.
So I'll select that. I'll click OK.
And that looks pretty great for this page.
Naturally, everything above that section break
was not affected.
So now if I scroll down in my document,
this page is looking great.
But this page does not look great.
So here's what I'm going to do.
I want to separate this page with another section break.
Now, scrolling up here
you can see I already have a page break,
which we set up in another video.
But because I have my non-printing characters turned on,
it's very easy to see it.
And it's very easy to delete it.
All I need to do is place my mouse cursor
to the right of it,
then hit the Delete key to delete it.
And I want to replace it with a section break instead.
So with my cursor still there,
I'll go to the Layout ribbon, to the Breaks menu.
Once again, we'll choose the section break
that pushes everything to the next page.
So I can see that section break there.
I can see everything down here
has been separated into another section.
I just need to click somewhere on this page,
go to my Columns menu,
switch that back to the single-column layout.
And that looks better.
Now really all I need to do
is remove this extra paragraph break that we have here.
I can see that with my non-printing characters,
and I can easily delete it.
Okay, let's look at one more section break.
Scrolling down here to this page
we already had with the three-column layout.
Looks pretty good,
except I feel like this header line
is kind of squished inside of this column.
So I can actually separate things on the same page
with a section break.
So I'm going to click at the end of this line.
Then I'll go to my Breaks menu.
We're going to do a section break,
but I do not want to push everything below it
to the next page.
I want it all to be continuous,
so it all stays on the same page.
So I'm going to click to select that.
And you can see
once again, I ended up with an extra paragraph break,
but I can easily delete that.
And so it's hard to see because there's not a lot of space,
but this line represents that section break.
So this line is in its own little section,
and everything below it is in another section.
So I can click on this line
and I can change the column layout.
I'm going to switch that to one column
and it will affect that line
without affecting the rest of the page.
And now I have this nice header
that stretches across the page.
Okay, so that looks a lot better.
Let's go back to the Home ribbon,
turn off the non-printing characters
so we can see the document normally.
And we'll just sort of scroll through it.
I start with one column,
then there's a section break and I've got two columns.
Then there's a section break back to one column.
Another section break where we have three columns.
And this continuous section break
so I can have this header stretch across the page.
So for a simple document,
you could definitely just format the whole thing
with the same column layout.
But for more complex documents,
you can combine section breaks with columns
to get a much better layout.