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How to Work with Columns in Word 2016

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2016-03-26 07:22:16
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Word 2010 For Dummies
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You probably don't think of a document's text as a column. No, it's just text on a page, margin to margin. Secretly, however, Word 2016 looks at such text as a single column. So whether you use columns or not, Word has already formatted your document that way.

To set the number of text columns on a page, you use Word's Columns command: Click the Layout tab, and in the Page Setup group, click the Columns button. A menu appears, listing common column-formatting options, as shown on the left here.

The Columns menu and dialog box.
The Columns menu and dialog box.

To be more specific with column layout, choose the More Columns command, at the bottom of the Columns menu. The Columns dialog box appears, as shown on the right.

The Columns dialog box helps you to create and design multiple columns not available on the Columns menu: Use the Number of Columns box to set the quantity of columns desired. Use the Preview window to determine how the page is formatted. Click the OK button to apply the column format to the text.

  • Click the mouse to best position the insertion pointer on a page when working with multiple text columns. That's because the keyboard's cursor-movement keys don't operate in a predictable manner when a document uses more than one column of text.

  • Columns are a document-level format. Choosing a column format from the Columns button menu affects the entire document, reformatting every page to the number of columns specified.

  • If you need to set different column formats on different pages, split the document into sections. In that case, the column type you chose affects only the current section.

  • When you're working with columns and notice that Word starts acting slow and fussy, save your work!

  • Maximum number of columns per page? That depends on the size of the page. Word's minimum column width is half an inch, so a typical sheet of paper can have up to 12 columns — not that such a layout would be appealing or anything.

About This Article

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About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.