Use both in the same document

See how to use both landscape and portrait orientation in the same document.

Use different orientations in the same document

There may be times when you want certain pages or sections of your document to have a different orientation from the rest of it. Note that Word puts selected text on its own page, and the surrounding text on separate pages.

1. Select the pages or paragraphs whose orientation you want to change.
2. Click PAGE LAYOUT >Page Setup dialog box launcher.
3. In the Page Setup box, under Orientation, click Portrait or Landscape.
4. Click the Apply to box, and click Selected text.

Note: Word automatically inserts section breaks before and after the text that has the new page orientation. If your document is already divided into sections, you can click in a section (or select multiple sections), and then change the orientation for only the sections that you select. Read about how to find out where the section breaks are in documents.

Where are the section breaks in a document?

When you add section breaks in your document, the easiest way to see where they begin and end is to first display all formatting marks.

• Click HOME >Show/Hide.
• The section breaks that you have added will start and end with Section Break (Continuous). There are other kinds of section breaks and will be labeled as such.

Want more?

Let’s say we are working on a long document that looks great in portrait orientation, except for a few pages that have big tables.

Well, rather than choose between nice-looking text and readable tables, we can have it both ways.

Right-click the Table Selection icon, and choose Table Properties.

On the Table tab, under Text wrapping, make sure None is selected, and click OK.

Next, go to the PAGE LAYOUT tab, and in the Page Setup group, click the dialog box launcher.

Go to it if you want to get into all the details of Page Setup in one place.

Margins, Paper, Layout, all right here. On the Margins tab, under Orientation, click Landscape.

Then, go down here and click the arrow next to Apply to, and choose Selected text.

Now the only thing that will change to landscape is the selected text. Click OK.

The table is now in landscape orientation on its own page, and when we scroll to another page, you can see that the rest of the document is still in portrait orientation.

Now we can go back to the table and adjust the column widths to stretch the table out to fit nicely on the page.

So, what exactly is going on here? First, go to the VIEW tab and let’s click Multiple Pages.

Now you can see the landscape page in the same view with the portrait pages.

Next, go to the HOME tab, and click Show/Hide Paragraph Marks.

And there’s the secret to mixing portrait and landscape in one document – Section Break (Next Page). I’ll zoom back a bit.

When we applied landscape to just the selected text, Word added section breaks before and after the table.

This placed the table in its own section, on a page by itself. Then, Word was able to change just that page to landscape.

By the way, section breaks also allow you to change the margins on the landscape pages without affecting the rest of the document.

You can add the same type of section break manually, whenever you want to change the layout or formatting of a page or pages, by going to the PAGE LAYOUT tab and clicking Breaks. Then, go down to Section Breaks and click Next Page.

After you use multiple page orientations and margins to create the frames for your document, you can think about the best way to lay out your content within the frames.

Check out the next video in this course, Design considerations for orientation.