Mediaboss Marketing

April 17, 2012, 11:57 AM PDT

Takeaway: Words page and section breaks often confound users. They often enter them when they dont mean to, creating structural problems that the user doesnt know how to eliminate.

Other than styles, page and section breaks probably cause the most confusion and trouble for the untrained user. Documents end up with unwanted breaks that play havoc with page numbering, formats, and printing. Users dont always realize that theyre the problem - they inserted the breaks, whether intentionally or not.

You can create a new page at any time by pressing [Ctrl]+[Enter]. Or, click the Page Break option in the Pages group on the Insert tab. (Page Break is on the Insert menu in Word 2003.) Unfortunately, manual page breaks (also known as hard page breaks) cause trouble because they dont flow with the documents structure. As you add and delete elements, you might find manual page breaks no longer appropriate. Fortunately, theyre easy to delete. Position the cursor at the beginning of the next page and press [Delete]. Or, click the Show/Hide option in the Paragraph group on the Home tab to display the page break element, highlight it, and press Delete. Manual breaks are probably the easiest break problem to find and resolve.

Manual page breaks might be easy to insert, but theyre seldom the best way to break. Sometimes the break really belongs to the text. That happens when you want a break to occur before or after a specific paragraph of text. Consequently, you could end up with an unexpected page break thats all but impossible to get rid of, unless you know its cause. To access these options, click the Paragraph groups dialog launcher and then click the Line And Page Breaks tab.

Word enables the Widow/Orphan Control by default. This option prevents a single line from appearing at the top or bottom of a page. The remaining options, which youll apply as needed, follow:

These options are almost always preferable to a manual break.

Section breaks can be more troublesome than page breaks, because many users dont understand the nature of sections. A section lets you control formatting as needs change. For instance, you might want to print part of or an entire page in landscape in the middle of a document thats using portrait orientation. To do so, youd insert a new section for the landscape components and format that section as landscape. The sections before and after would remain in portrait. To access section breaks, click the Page Layout tab.

Originally posted here:
Troubleshoot page and section breaks in Microsoft Word