Dreamboat on Word: Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003 (On Office series)

Types of Breaks and When to Use

Page Break

Page breaks are easily inserted by hitting Ctrl+Enter on your keyboard. Instead of hitting the Enter key a number of times to get your cursor to the top of the next page, use Ctrl+Enter instead. This inserts a manual page break.

The problems with using paragraph returns to get to the next page are these:

• If you later add text somewhere, you must readjust all of the paragraph returns so that your text isn’t all moved down.

• Some printers print differently than others. If you use a page break, the text on the next page is sure to print at the top of the page.

  If you use paragraph returns, the printer driver may actually shift these up or down. The longer the document, the worse the shifting will be.

It is not necessary to use page breaks in your documents at all. Certain paragraph formatting provides for some of the reasons we use page breaks.

For instance, if I want to ensure that the text in my paragraph above stays with the bullets that follow it, regardless of how much text I insert on pages above it, I would click inside that paragraph, hit Format Paragraph, choose the Line and Page Breaks tab and choose the Keep with Next option. This keeps the paragraph return on the same page as the next paragraph return.

When discussing styles, I said that you would not need to use paragraph returns to put space between your paragraphs. This is the perfect example to explain why an additional paragraph return between the above paragraph and its following bullets does not work well with other Word features.

Here, the Keep with Next only ensures that the leading paragraph of text would stay on the same page with the paragraph return that is used for spacing between paragraphs and not with the next bulleted item’s paragraph return.

Column Break

This break simply allows you to move to the top of the next column in a newsletter or other column layout. When you have not set any columns, Word still provides a one-column layout. So, in effect, a column break works as a page break when you have not formatted to use multiple columns.

Text Wrapping Break

The text below a text-wrapping break is forced to drop below the item being wrapped around. This is great to use when you’re starting a new paragraph while the text is wrapping, and it would not look right to have the first sentence cut off.

Next-Page Section Break

The least confusing section break is the next-page section break. It combines a section break with a page break. It allows you to change headers and footers from one page or group of pages to the next.

By default, the next-page section break assigns the headers and footers to be Same as Previous. I provide more information about this later in this section.

Continuous Section Break

If I had my way, this section break type would not exist. Suppose you have a long list of bullets and you would like them to appear side by side instead of vertically down the page. Above the list, you can insert a continuous section break, format the bulleted list area to be a two- or three-column layout, insert another continuous section break below the bulleted list, and then format back to a one-column layout.

Likewise, if you were to select the bulleted list and then format a multi-column layout, Word would automatically insert the continuous section breaks for you.

So why don’t we like them? Virtually any column layout you might want to use is much more easily produced in a Word table, while avoiding confusion about the number of sections in your document. If you have a 300-page document with 7 chapters, you’ll have 8 sections, the first section being the cover page and Table of Contents.

If you have 3 areas of column formats, you’ll have 11 sections. This would drive even the best Word desktop publishers insane trying to figure out which section and chapter they’re working in.

Even-Page Section Break

Suppose you are using a duplex printed layout. Duplex means you’re printing the document two-sided. You may want every new Chapter of your manual to start on an even page or left-hand page. This is highly unlikely; so we’ll save the description of this, which is similar, for the next section break type.

Odd-Page Section Break

More likely to be used than an even-page, the odd-page section break is like a next-page section break, except that it forces the page number to be that of the next available odd page number. Suppose our chapter 2 is 9 pages long. It began on page 11 and ended on page 19. We want the next chapter to start on the next odd page, or page 21. Inserting an odd-page section break makes that occur.

Okay, so I’m not crazy about this section break either. Why? I’ll tell you:

• Some printers do not recognize the appropriate duplex printing commands of Word. Hence, you are forced to insert any blank pages that may exist. In our example above, page 20 would not even exist. So your duplex print job could get all messed up by printing page 21 on the back of page 19 instead of making a blank page 20.

• If you’re printing this document and copying it with a duplex copier, again, you won’t have the blank page 20 to insert and print onto the back of page 19. So you could easily waste tons of paper.

  What’s our workaround? Use regular next-page section breaks instead. It is far nicer to have the blank page and, perhaps, a statement like “This page intentionally left blank,” than to deal with the issues above. As you move from one page to the next, you’ll know exactly where you are.

  If you’re an experienced Word user, perhaps you understand these issues. But what happens when you move onto another job or get a promotion? The person who takes your place must also know of these anomalies.