How to Insert Section Breaks and Columns in MS Word 2016

Sub-divisions of a document called sections. When a document is divided into sections, you can make formatting changes to each section separately. For example, you can change the page orientation, page numbering, or the number of columns for just one section.

Sections are separated by section breaks. Sections always start on a new line. Section break can never be in the middle of a line of text. If you insert a section break in the middle of a line, Word will take the text, after the section break, to appear on a new line.

First, you should enable the non-printing characters to make it easy to understand what is going on in your document. Non-printing characters are the characters, which define the design of your document, but they are not printable.

Click on the reverse P shape in the Home Tab of your word document and it will enable the non-printing characters.

Sections are important in shaping your document. You can find section breaks in the Layout tab.

In the Layout tab, locate the Breaks option.

Click on the Breaks option and a drop-down menu will open showing different kinds of breaking options such as page breaks and section breaks

If you want to transform a few paragraphs into multiple columns, just move your cursor to the start point of the text and insert a continuous section break and add another continuous section break at the endpoint of the text.

Now Click the columns button and select your desired option from the drop-down menu. The column button is also located in the Layout tab.

Alternatively, you can select the text

After selecting the text, Click the columns button and select your desired option from the drop-down menu.

These settings are for Microsoft Office 2016. Minor differences may occur with the change in the version of MS-Office

Muhammad Imran Habib

Imran is a technology evangelist with 8 years of experience working with some of the Industry leading companies. Imran's expertise includes On-Prem/Virtual Infrastructure deployments, IT Solutions for SMEs, End User Computing Support.

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