create a 280 split page trainer's doc that word wraps

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MarianneM

Need to redesign a 280 landscaped split page document that allows me to
insert page breaks on the left side of the document and can word wrap to the
next page on the left side. The right side has Instructor's Notes as a
heading and may or may not have text on any given page. Currently the
document is designed as a table on each page. This document is growing with
new iterations of software applications so I need to be able to easily insert
new pages without having to manually add lines to create page breaks.

Should I keep this with table formatting or set it up as columns? What are
the advantages either way?
 
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Suzanne S. Barnhill

You need to clarify what you mean by "split page." If you mean that you have
two separate text flows on each page, then a table is the best way to
approach this (newspaper-style columns will not work at all). Your
"Instructor's Notes" heading can be a repeated table heading or can be put
in the page header. You can easily insert a page break (without breaking the
table) by starting a new row and formatting it as "Page break before."
Although Word is never entirely comfortable with long tables, it is long
single-row tables that especially give it fits. As long as no table row is
longer than a page, you should be okay, though it doesn't hurt to break the
table whenever possible (to insert a heading, for example).

If, on the other hand, what you're actually trying to do is create facing
pages of text and notes, then there is no practical way to do this in Word.
Publisher would handle the alternating pages more easily (with text boxes),
but I suspect 280 pages might be straining its limits. For that you would
need to use a real DTP application.
 
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MarianneM

Yes. I have two separate text flows on each page. I will change the
document so that the table doesn't run for more than a couple pages at most.
This should solve my problems. Thanks for the tip about page breaks. I kept
wondering why the page break would appear before the page rather than where I
was inserting it at the end of a page.

I guess there is just no easy way to handle this since I am trying to create
facing pages with notes and I want the text on the left side to be able to
continueally wrap from one page to the next page while placing the Instructor
Notes at the top of each page on the right side.
 
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Margaret Aldis

If the text is continuous, but the notes are sporadic and associated with
particular pieces of text, you could do this another way.

Set up your margins so that the text flows continuously down the left side
of the page - let it flow, controlling it with "Keep with nexts" rather than
hard breaks as far as possible. Then use text boxes for the instructor
notes. Position the text boxes relative to the page in the space on the
right. Anchor to the relevant bit of text and lock the anchor. Obviously,
you might still have to do a bit of pagination work to make sure you only
get one text box on a page (maybe some notes will have to share a text box)
but depending on the density of instructor notes and the fluidity of the
main text story this may be less painful than the table method.
 
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Margaret Aldis

Yes, that's true, but then if the notes have any complexity you have to have
a whole set of styles (all derived from the same framed base style) for
different formatting within the frame. (I quite like this and have done
margin notes including bullet points that way in one of my manual designs,
but I'm not sure it would be to everyone's taste <g>).

I should have flagged the usual limitations of the text box idea, though -
if you wanted a TOC of the instructor notes or any cross referencing you'd
be stuck.
 
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Suzanne S. Barnhill

And of course the overall drawback of text boxes OR frames is that they
can't break over pages, though text boxes at least could be linked.
 
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