Word Tutorial: Inserting a Landscape Page into your Portrait document

As project control professionals we are constantly preparing reports in Microsoft Word. In conjunction with our word files we often have to insert graphs and tables that are often much wider than tall. These images are much easier to read when printed a landscape rather than portrait.

In this tutorial we will show you how you can use section breaks to insert a landscape page into a portrait word document to enhance the overall visual quality of your report.  To accomplish this we will be creating three specific sections within our word document.

• Section 1: Will be a Portrait Page (Page #1)
• Section 2: Will be our Landscape Page (Page #2)
• Section 3: Will be the reports default Portrait Page (Page #)

Feel free to download our example as you go through this tutorial here:

Insert Next Page Section Breaks

Section breaks do not appear in the “Print Layout” view. So the first thing we need to do is switch our view from “Print Layout” to “Draft.” In our example we will have three sections which will be designated by the text “Portrait Page 1”, “Landscape Page 2” and “Portrait Page 3.”

Once in Draft layout we need to insert two Next Page Section Breaks between our sections of text. You should have something that looks like this:

You can check to see if this worked properly by going back to “Print Layout” and view your headers. To view your headers simply click the Insert Tab -> Headers Drop Down -> Edit Headers. Once you view headers you will notice that your headers now reflect the three sections.

Rotate Page Orientation

Now we need to rotate the orientation of Section 2 from Portrait to Landscape. To do this we first need to have our cursor selected on any of the text in Page 2 – i.e. simply put your cursor in the first word on Page 2.

Next we need to change the orientation of the section.  To do this go to the Page Layout Tab -> Orientation -> select Landscape

You should now have a Portrait – Landscape – Portrait document

Working with “Same as Previous”

 As with most of your reports you probably already are using a report header / footer that repeats on all pages. The default setting when incorporating section breaks is to use the same header as the previous section. This is what the “Same as Previous” box indicates in your header.

If you wish to have a different header or footer go back into your edit header (Insert Tab -> Headers Dropdown -> Edit Headers) menu. Once in the header / footer design tab you will have option to de-select the Link to Previous option. Once either the header / footer are un-linked you can change the header / margins etc. as required to format each section independent of the others.

Continuous Breaks

This is just one example of using sections and breaks in Microsoft word. This same methodology can be applied to insert a section with Multiple Columns and different margins. The section break function really opens up the formatting of word to any number of combinations of page formats in the same word documents.

Download example:

There you have it a quick way to change your word document page orientations.  Let us know what your experience have been with working with breaks in Microsoft Word.