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The idea of sections is one of the hardest concepts for Word users to grasp. Word allows users to insert Sections into a document so they can change formatting in a particular area of a document. In some cases, you must insert a new section to accomplish what you need to do. For example, if you need to create columns, you have to add a section break and then column breaks. If that sounds like Greek to you, stay tuned as I demystify these concepts.
For those of you familiar with Monty Python, think of using a section break as telling your document "…and now for something completely different."
Mystery (Automatic) Section Breaks
When you create a Word document, you can set up certain aspects of the document layout, such as the margins and page orientation. If you don't change the layout yourself, Word picks up the settings that have been defined within your master template, which is called Normal.dot. Even if you've never set a Word margin in your life, the default Normal.dot template has margins defined for you by Microsoft. The defaults are set to one inch for all four sides and portrait orientation.
So what if you wanted to create a document that starts out with 1-inch margins all around, but at some point in the document you want to change the margins by widening them all out to 1/2-inch. If you were to just stop what you were typing, and choose File|Page Setup to modify the margin settings, you quickly see the problem. Your entire document now has 1/2-inch margins.
The Margin dialog box does give you an option of setting margins for This point forward, however.
If you give that option a try, you discover it doesn't quite do what you probably want. If you wanted the margin change to happen within the page, you'll be distressed to find Word jumps you to a new, next page. An alternative is to change your paragraph style so the new content is outdented to display the margin look you want. (But if you think understanding Sections is confusing, you should see how many people mess up Style modifications!)
Another problem is that if you don't understand sections, you also won't realize that, when you selected the This point forward option, Word actually put in a section break for you. If you change the margins back later in the document, suddenly you'll have three sections in your document. Before you know it, you're totally confused because you're trying to set page footers and some are working and others are not and you have no idea why! The reason is because you don't realize your document has now been chopped up into separate sections and you're not setting the footer for the proper section.
As you can see, learning to understand what's actually going on with sections can save you a lot of head banging.
Hidden Markers
The first thing you need to learn about Sections is how to see them. You can always tell which section your cursor is in by looking down at your Status Bar. It gives you a lot of information about where you're at in your document, including the section number. As you can see in the image below, my current cursor position is on page 6 of an 8 page document, on line 1, col 51 (character position number) of section 2, with a 0.5" left margin.
That's good information. Unfortunately, you'd have to jump to the end of the document (Ctrl + End) to see how many sections are in your document, as the referenced document actually had three sections total. The section display just tells you where you are now.
Another way to help you pay attention to where you are and what section breaks you're inserting is to turn on some of Word's hidden visual markers. By clicking Tools > Options > View, you can selectively turn on many helpful visual markers. To get the Section markers to display, you need to check the All option.
A faster way to toggle all the markers on/off is to use the Show/Hide icon on your Standard toolbar, which looks like a paragraph marker.
Or you can get into the habit of simply hitting the Ctrl + Shift + * key combination whenever you want to toggle the markers on/off to get your bearings.
When you do toggle on the markers, you'll not only see where the section break is, but also the type of break that was inserted.
This visual information also helps you better understand what you are deleting, so when you are editing you don't accidentally delete a section marker. For example, say you've inserted a section break for a new page and then changed the page orientation on that new page from portrait to landscape. If you accidentally delete the section marker, not only will the information on the following page jump up to the current location, but worse, your document orientation can easily go nuts.
This first image shows a document where the majority of pages are portrait oriented with a few section breaks, so one page can be changed to landscape.
If I delete just one critical section marker, you can see in this next image, my document turns to spaghetti!
These types of simple problems can make a new Word user run screaming.
If you understand what the markers are and display them, you can be careful not to delete the ones you're not sure about and save your sanity. Remember that if you delete a marker by mistake, you can easily reverse the problem by hitting Ctrl + Z (undo) to put things back together.
Types of Section Breaks
You can add a number of different types of breaks to your document. The first three relate to the page, a column, or a line of text. Page, column, and section breaks are added by choosing Insert|Break.
Page break
This break stops the current page at the point of insertion and adds a new page to your document. Another way to insert this type of break is to press the Ctrl + Enter key combination.
Column break
If you have defined columns in your document, you insert this break at the point where you want the current column to stop and a new column to begin. It works much like a page break, except that it is used to start a new column instead of a new page. If you work with columns often, the Ctrl + Shift + Enter insert column break shortcut comes in handy.
Line Break
If you are typing along and need text to wrap to the next line for some reason, pressing the Enter key inserts a paragraph break. This "hard" line break causes the next line to become a new paragraph. Because Word styles involve paragraphs, creating a new paragraph can cause problems in certain situations. Sometimes it's better to cut the line yet keep the content part of the same paragraph. To insert this type of "soft" line break or Text wrapping break, you press Shift + Enter.
These are types of Section breaks:
Next page
A Next Page section break stops the current page and starts a new page. However, the new page is also a new Section. A Next page break is similar to inserting a new page break, but creates a new section, as well.
Continuous
A Continuous section break lets you insert a new section at the current insertion point, without automatically adding a new page. This type of break allows you to change settings within the same page, so you can have multiple sections on one page.
Even page
The Even page section break inserts a new section, but forces the section to start on a new, evenly numbered page. If the next page should be an odd page, a blank page will be added as a skipped odd page, so that your section will begin on an even numbered page.
Odd page
This break is the reverse of an Even page section break. And Odd page section break adds a new section and ensures that it starts on a new odd numbered page.
Inserting Section Breaks
It can be worthwhile to insert manual section breaks where and when you need them, so you have a better understanding of what's going on in your document. For example, if you wanted to change the margin settings in the middle of a page (as mentioned in the beginning of this article), rather than using the This point forward option in the Margin dialog box, choose Insert|Break and choose the Continuous section break option.
Now you can change the margins as usual. The Margin dialog box will now say This section and it really will start at "this point forward" (and not beginning on a new page as the This point forward option does).
Similarly, if you wanted to change the page orientation in the middle of a document, you would insert a section break. You'd add it before you change the orientation of a page in your document, and then add another section break to return the orientation back to the original format. (Remember "…and now for something completely different.")
Inserting columns work much the same way. Think of your standard document as a page with one column. Suppose you now want two columns. You actually change the page format from a one-column page into a two-column page. So you're…doing something different! So first you need to insert a Section break. The type of section break depends on how you want your document to look. If you want the columns to start within the same page, use a Continuous break. If you want the two-columns to begin on a new page, use the Next page section break. The same goes for Odd or Even pages, if you were creating a book-style document.
Navigating Sections
After you start inserting sections, your document goes from a simple one-section document to a much more complex multi-section document. These documents can be tricky to use and navigate. One advantage to sections is that you can change header or footer styles or content by inserting a section break and then changing the header/footer information or layout. Just make sure that you are careful to properly set the Link to previous option on the header/footer toolbar.
By default, all headers/footers are linked to their successor in the previous section. This setting assumes that most people do not want the headers/footers in a document to change. However, if your goal is to change the headers and footers in a new section, you need to pay attention to whether the new section header and/or footer should be linked to the previous set. You can choose to keep the header linked and just change the footer, or vice versa.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to remember which header/footer is set to which section. If you miss one, you have to do some troubleshooting to check the settings in each section. Knowing how to jump around from section to section can be vital to your sanity.
The simplest way to move to a different section is just to use the GoTo dialog box. You can access this dialog by pressing Ctrl + G or by double-clicking Sec on your status bar. Type in the number of the Section you want to go to and your cursor jumps to the start of that section. Remember to toggle on your markers by hitting Ctrl + Shift + * so you can see what you're doing.
If you're a real sections junkie, there's a great macro from Microsoft that came as an extra addin in Word 95. If you didn't save yourself a copy, you can grab the code module from my web site (http://www.mousetrax.com/downloads.html#SectionMgr). This macro was such a wonderful tool that I snatched it up and use it all the time.
Although instructions for the macro are on the Web page, basically you just need to open the downloaded template and within the VB Editor drag the Section Manager code module into your Normal.dot. Note that the code is written in older WordBasic, but it still works in newer VBA versions of Word. Once you have added it, just create a keyboard shortcut to the Normal.SectionManager.MAIN macro to run it whenever you want.
Many of the extra addins in that old version of Word were macros created by Microsoft developers in an attempt to provide users with extra tools that were not part of Word. Many of those tools did, eventually, become features in Word. Why they never added this fantastic Section Manager tool, I'll never know. It provides gobs of information about your document and allows you to better manage it section by section.
Below is a sample of the information it provides. Even cooler, it provides quick click access to the other dialog boxes you'll probably need, such as columns and page numbering.
Too cool, eh?
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