Text looks great when it is laid out in newspaper-style columns. In columns, you can pack more text on the page. And you can put two or three stories on a page and give readers a choice as to which story they read first. This part of the chapter explains how to create newspaper-style columns in Word like the columns shown in Figure 10-14. It tells how to adjust the width of columns, break columns in the middle, create a heading that straddles columns, and make text in columns float to different pages.
However, before you take the plunge and create columns, I strongly recommend getting out a piece of scratch paper and designing your little newsletter. Decide how wide to make the columns, how much space to put between columns, how many columns you want, and how tall to make the headings. While you're at it, choose File | Page Setup and tell Word how wide to make the margins. You usually don't need wide margins, headers, or footers in a newsletter. Word gives you lots of opportunities to tinker with columns and column sizes after you lay them out, but it takes a lot of time and shilly-shallying to do that. Better to get it right from the start and know precisely what you want to do.
CAUTION: You can only work with column properties and formatting in Page Layout view.
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Some people create a two- or three-column document when they should be creating a table instead. Resumes, for example, are usually laid out in two columns (one for job titles, for example, and one for job descriptions), but you would be foolish to use Word's Column command to lay out a resume. Why? Because when you enter text at the top of the first column, text gets bumped downward to the bottom of the first column and into the second column. With Word's Column command, text "snakes" from one column to the next whenever you enter new text. If you were trying to create a resume or other document in which the text in one column has to refer to the text in the next column (Job Title to Job Description, for example), you would go through hell trying to line up text in the two columns. Each time you made an edit or entered a word or two, text would start snaking and everything would turn into chaos.
For resumes, schedules, and other two-column documents in which one column refers to the other, create a two-column table. Then optionally remove the table borders. See "Working with Tables in Word," later in this chapter.
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The Columns button on the Standard toolbar offers a fast but dicey way to create columns, but I think you should be thorough about it. The Columns button simply throws out a number of columns and says, "Hello, I'm done." But columns are a tricky affair. It's hard to get them right the first time.
When you create columns, Word asks what part of the document to "columnize," so where the cursor is matters a lot when you give the command to create columns. You can columnize an entire document, everything past the position of the cursor, an entire section, or selected text. Word creates a new section when you create columns in the middle of a document.
Following are instructions for creating columns and for adjusting columns after you have created them:
1. If you are creating columns, place the cursor in a section you want to columnize, select the text you want to columnize, or place the cursor at the position where columns are to begin appearing. If you are adjusting a column layout, click in a column.
2. Choose Format | Columns. You see the Columns dialog box shown in Figure 10-15.
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3. Click a Presets box to choose a predesigned column layout of one, two, or three columns; or, if you want more than three columns, enter the number of columns you want in the Number Of Columns box.
4. Click the Line Between check box if you want Word to draw lines between columns.
CAUTION: You can't have
it both ways. If you click the Line between check box, lines appear between all
the columns. You can't tell Word to place lines between one or two columns but
not the others.
5. If you want to, tell Word how wide each column should be and how much space to put between columns in the Width And Spacing area. Watch the Preview box to see the effects of your choices. As you make entries in the Width and Spacing boxes, Word adjusts width and spacing settings so that all the columns can fit across the page. Be prepared to wrestle with these option boxes:
· Width For each column, enter a number to tell Word how wide to make the column. Click the down arrow on the scroll bar, if necessary, to get to the fourth, fifth, or sixth column. (Make sure the Equal Column Width check box is cleared if you want columns of unequal size.)
· Spacing For each column, enter a number to tell Word how much space to put between it and the column to its right.
6. In the Apply To drop-down list, tell Word to "columnize" the section that the cursor is in, the remainder of the document, the entire document, or text you selected.
7. Click OK.