When wanting to start something on a new page in Microsoft Word, many people simply hit ‘Enter’ repeatedly until a new page appears. This is a bad idea for two reasons:
Thus, if you want a professional-looking document, knowing how to use Microsoft Word’s page and section breaks is essential.
A ‘page break’ is a break in your document that lets you start typing on a new page. Even better is that, in Word 2007 or later, a basic page break can be added with very little effort:
Inserting a page break.
The same effect can be achieved using the ‘Breaks’ menu in the ‘Page Layout’ tab, but this approach also offers additional options for formatting breaks in your document.
One of the aforementioned additional options is adding a ‘section break’. Section breaks are useful if you want to apply specific formatting to different parts of your document, such as headers or distinct page numbering styles. To add a section break between pages:
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The ‘Breaks’ menu.
You can also add a section break in the middle of a page by selecting ‘Continuous’ from this menu. This is handy if you want to apply different formatting options to a single page, but not usually required in an academic document.
It’s sometimes hard to see where page and section breaks are when editing a document. However, this can be remedied by clicking the ‘Show/Hide Paragraph Marks’ button (¶) in the ‘Paragraph’ section of the ‘Home’ tab.
This will make page and section breaks in your document visible, along with carriage returns and spaces between words. You can then move, delete or edit around breaks as required.
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