Adding Columns to Your Page Layout

As you format your documents in Word, you may find it better to lay out your text in columns. This is usually done if you are developing a newsletter or a magazine layout. The number of columns you use is up to you—Word allows you to divide your page into as many as 100 columns (depending on your version of Word), although this may look a bit strange. To add columns, follow these steps if you are using Word 2007:

1. Position the insertion point at the beginning of the material you want to appear in columns.
2. Choose the Page Layout tab for the ribbon.
3. In the Page Setup group, click the Columns drop-down list.
4. Pick the number of columns you want to use for the selected text.

When you do step 3 you can select the most common numbers of columns (1, 2, or 3). If you want more columns then these, click the More Columns option in step 4 and you will see the Columns dialog box (Click here to see a related figure.) where you can set up to 45 columns.

There is an interesting side note here. If you use the up and down arrows in the Number of Columns field of the Columns dialog box to set columns, you can only choose a range between 1 and 13 columns when you are using portrait-oriented letter-size paper. If you change to landscape-oriented paper, then you can use the control to go between 1 and 18 columns. It appears that Word sets the upper limit of the control so that no individual column on the paper will be less than a half-inch wide. If you change the printable area of your page (adjust the paper size, orientation, and margins), then Word adjusts the upper limit of the Number of Columns control.

Don't let this fool you, however. You can still set up to 45 columns—sort of. You just have to type the number into the Number of Columns control. If you try to type a number that is larger than 45, Word generates an error message that says you can only set between 1 and 45 columns. So, you can try to type a larger number into the control, but when you do and then start working with a different control in the dialog box, Word adjusts the number of columns back down to the calculated maximum discussed previously. (Word just won't let you set a column width narrower than half an inch, and this limits the number of columns you can get on the page.)

If you are using an older version of Word, you can set the number of columns in your layout by following these steps instead:

1. Position the insertion point at the beginning of the material you want to appear in columns.
2. Select the Columns option from the Format menu. Word displays the Columns dialog box.
3. Click on one of the presets at the top of the dialog box, or specify the number of columns wanted in the Number of Columns field.
4. If you don't want your entire document to have columns, in the Apply To drop-down list select This Point Forward. This causes Word to apply columns beginning where the insertion point is located.
5. Click on the Line Between check box (if you want a vertical line between the columns).
6. Click on OK.

What if you have a document and you want to format part of it in columns? As an example, let's assume you have a 5-page document, and you want to format the center part of page 2 as three columns. You want rest of the document to remain a single column. To overcome this formatting challenge there are only two changes you need to make to the above steps. First, in step 1, you need to select the text that will appear in the columns. Second, in step 4, you need to use the Apply To drop-down list to choose Selected Text.