Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Section Formatting

The Formatting Palette doesn’t say anything about section formatting. In fact, most people have never even heard of it.

Still, section formatting is important in a few special circumstances, such as these:

• Sections allow you to divide a document into chapters, each with its own headers or footers.

• Sections let you change from, say, a one-column format for your opening paragraph to a three-column format for the body of the article. They also let you insert a landscape-orientation page or two into a paper that’s primarily in portrait orientation.

• Sections give you flexibility in printing. You can print your title page on colored paper from a different paper tray on your printer, for example.

• You can set different margins for each section of your document. This might come in handy if your training manual includes multiple choice quizzes for which you could really use narrower page margins.

The bottom line: A section is a set of pages in your document that can have its own independent settings for page numbering, lines, footnotes, and endnotes. It can also have its own layout features, such as page borders, margins, columns, alignment, text orientation, and even page size. Finally, it can have its own printer settings, such as orientation and paper source.

Inserting and Removing Section Breaks

To start a new section, choose Insert → Break, then choose one of the Section Break types—depending upon where you want the new section to begin (relative to the current page). For ...