Give me a (section) break!

Section breaks are a bit of a mystery but if there’s one thing you should know about them, it’s this: section breaks control the formatting of the pages before it.  This includes formatting such as:

  • Headers / footers;
  • Page orientations – portrait versus landscape;
  • Page layouts, e.g. standard one column page versus two columns;
  • Page numbering.

It’s especially important to keep this in mind when deleting section breaks because deleting a break will result in the pages before it taking on the formatting of the next section (i.e. because those pages now sit within the next section).

Of course, there’s no real issue where the formatting (listed above) is identical within consecutive sections of your document. But then again, if that’s the case, why are you using section breaks? Something to ponder …

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