How to Divide Text into Columns in Microsoft Office (MS) Word

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When we read news papers, we can observe that the information is devided into number of small columns of text rather than a single large text paragraph. This type paragraph division into different number of columns can be done very easily in MS Word. Pc problem like this can be very tricky for beginners and these columns are refered as Newspaper columns.

To experiment with text column options, follow the steps given bellow..

• Open a file consisting of some information. Alternatively, if you dont have ready made text to experiement, just select and copy the following block of information into MS Word and paste there.

• You can open documents in many different locations from the Open dialog box in Word. You can open a document on your computer hard disk or on a network drive that you have a connection to. You can also open a document on a network, even if you don't have a connection to a network server, as long as your network supports UNC addresses.

• If your company has an intranet, or if you have access to the Internet (for example, if you have a modem and an Internet account through an Internet service provider, or if you are in a corporation and have access through the network), you can open a document located at an HTTP site on the World Wide Web or at an FTP site. If your company has an intranet, you can open documents there. For information about how to set up Internet access, see the Microsoft Office 97 Resource Kit. For information about how to obtain the Office Resource Kit, click.

• For documents located on your computer hard disk or on a network drive that you have write access to, you can open a document as a copy if you want to create and work on a copy of the document instead of the original. And regardless of where the document is located, you can open a document as read-only if you want to make sure you don't change the original document.

• Now let us try to divide the 2nd paragraph text into 3 different column text. First we need to select the text to be devided into columns. Refer the bellow screen shot for how the selection is made.

Select text to make columns.

•     Now click the Columns Menu Item from Format Menu. In the Columns dialog box, select Three columns option. You can also set this by using Number of columns option. Refer the screen shot shown bellow.

Selecting 3 column divider option.

• You can use Line between option to have a physical devider line between columns. You can also use Width and Spacing option to specify individual columns width and the spacing to be used. After making all selections, click OK. Now You can see the paragraph devided into three columns. 

See screen shot bellow.

You can experiement with other options available in columns dialog box to find how they works.