In this video, we're going to compare two different ways
of creating a column effect in Microsoft Word.
Here's a document which looks to have two columns.
The title spans the whole page.
If I click in the paragraph below,
the ruler shows that this column ends
at seven and a half centimetres.
If I click in the second column,
you may notice that a box appears around it.
That's because I've created this using a text box.
So I created the first column,
and in the layout,
put in 8.4 cm of indentation from the right.
That brought the page in 8.4 cm,
leaving the remaining 7.5.
I then created a text box
which is square wrapped
and moved it so that it was in line with my original paragraph.
So it looks like I have two columns
but a screen reader doesn't even know that this text box exists.
So now I'll show you how I should have created it.
I'm going to have to do a bit of backtracking.
So I'm going to copy that text
and then I'm going to delete the box.
I'm going to start a new paragraph
and paste my text.
I'm then going to get rid of that right indentation.
Set it back to zero.
So now I have just three paragraphs.
This is how I should have created my column effect.
I can highlight my text that I want to put in columns
and go to the layout menu.
I can click on columns.
I'm going to click on the drop down.
I could, if I want two equal sized columns, just click on two
and it will make those columns for me.
However, I might want to adjust the widths of the columns and the space between.
If so, I can click on the dropdown and go to more columns.
Check the number of columns is still two,
but I'm now going to untick equal column width
and I'm going to make the first column slightly wider
than the second,
and I'm going to take out
some of the spacing in the middle.
I want to take that down to 0.5 cm.
If I wanted to, I could put a line between the two columns as well.
Let's see what that would look like.
Actually, I don't like the line, so if I want to go and change something,
I highlight it all again, go into columns and more columns,
and now I can just remove the line.
And now I have two columns.
Because of the way that the line spacing has worked,
I don't actually like that spacing in between.
So I'm just going to add in a little bit more.
So I can go back as many times as I want to
and make some edits.
And in this 'Apply to'
it's showing this will only apply to the selected text.
So then when I've finished, I can continue with one column. There we go.
And if I was to
go back, I can now continue typing here across the whole page.