Video: Design considerations for orientation

See how landscape and portrait orientation affect headers and footers, page numbers, and margins, dealing with text in landscape view, and other design considerations.

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Video: Headers and footers

After you add pages with different orientations to your document, you can start thinking about design issues.

First, what do you do with your headers and footers?

You see, when you add a landscape page, the header and footer go to the top and bottom, just like they are supposed to.

But think about how the reader will view the page.

With all the pages printed out and stapled, the header and footer on the landscape page appear sideways on the right and left.

If you don’t prefer that look, here are some things you can try.

First, we need to unlink the header, so we can change it without changing all the other headers.

Let’s click VIEW, and Multiple Pages to change to Multiple Page View. So, it’s easier to see what’s going on.

Now double-click the header in the landscape page.

Because we added the header before we changed the orientation of the page, this box says Same as Previous, which means that this header is the same as the header on the previous page.

Another way you can tell is by going to the HEADER AND FOOTER TOOLS DESIGN tab, and looking at the Link to Previous button.

If it’s selected, like it is now, that means the header is linked to, or the same as, the previous page.

If we make a change in one header, like delete the text, the text is deleted in all the headers because they are linked.

I’ll press Ctrl+Z to bring the text back.

So, here’s what we need to do. So, we can change the header on just this page.

With the header selected, click Link to Previous to turn off linking, and the box that says Same as Previous goes away.

Click Next to move to the page after the landscape page, and turn off Link to Previous here, too.

Now, we can select the header on the landscape page and press Delete. And the other headers are unaffected.

If your pages also have footers, click Go to Footer and turn off linking there too.

We aren’t using footers, so let’s click the header and decide what we want to do next.

Let’s say we want to continue page numbering. I’ll zoom the page to 100 percent, so it’s easier to see.

Click the INSERT tab, Text Box, and Draw Text Box. Then, drag the cursor over the top left corner to create a small box.

Then, with the cursor in the box, click the INSERT tab, click Page Number, and Current Position.

Let’s choose a plain number.

Next, go to the DRAWING TOOLS FORMAT tab, click Text Direction, and Rotate all text 270 degrees.

You may need to do is resize the text box, so the number can be seen. Finally, click Shape Outline and No Outline.

The page number is rotated now, but when the page is printed and stapled to the portrait pages, it’ll be vertical.

Another thing to think about is how to deal with text in landscape view.

While extra width makes sense for a table or chart, it can make text hard to read.

One thing you could do is place an image next to the block of text.

This forces the text to flow around the image into a narrower margin.

If you want more control of the text width, you can insert a, 2-column, 1-row table, and place the image in one column and the text in the other.

Here’s another way to get narrower margins for your text. Select the text, then go to the PAGE LAYOUT tab, click Columns, and select a number of columns. Two works pretty well for this document.

So, page orientation works together with margins and paper size to create the frames for your document.

Then, you can work with the layout of your content to create the look you want.

For more information about working with sections, headers and footers, and other design issues, check out the links in the course summary.