Make columns' content equal in length?

[rVo]

Hi all,

I am trying to figure out if it is possible to stretch the content of a
column in order to make it match the length of another columns' content,
this will give a very nice layout (both columns line up with their top and
bottom), but to accomplish this manually is a real pain.

Expensive DTP suits like Pagemaker or Quark Express can do this simply by
enabling a setting. I know Word isn't a DTP package, but I managed to do a
very good job with it (thanks to VBA and some great resources) so I might as
well try.

I allready tried to acomplish the desired effect by removing any white
paragraphs and changing all styles to add just enough whitespace at the
paragraph's bottom side to replace the effect that Joe average tries to
reach with a double crlf. This mostly comes close to the desired effect, but
on some pages the column lenght is very far from matching.

Is there a chance to find the solution through this approach or should I
give up?

Thanks for your time/advice.

rVo

 

[Jay Freedman]

Place a continuous section break at the end of the multi-column text, and
Word will automatically balance the lengths of the columns.

Depending on the number of columns, the number of lines to be balanced, the
paragraphs' Space Before and Space After, and the hyphenation that's
enabled, one or two columns may be a line long or a line short. If any
paragraphs on the affected page have "Keep together" turned on, that
overrides the column balancing. There's also a compatibility option to
disable balancing ("Don't balance columns for continuous section starts"),
so you need to ensure that it's turned off -- which it is by default.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Jean-Guy Marcil]

rVo was telling us:
rVo nous racontait que :

Hi all,

I am trying to figure out if it is possible to stretch the content of
a column in order to make it match the length of another columns'
content, this will give a very nice layout (both columns line up with
their top and bottom), but to accomplish this manually is a real
pain.

I am not sure I understand:

Do you want to make two adjacent cells in a row to automatically have the
same content height, even if the content is different?
As in:

| One Line of text | One Line of text |
| | Two Lines of text |
| Two lines of text | Three Lines of text |
| | Four Lines of text |
| Three lines of text | Five Lines of text |

Vertical justification within table cells is not available with Word.
And doing this with a macro will be complicated, if possible at all. Unless
I am missing something obvious...

--
Salut!
_______________________________________
Jean-Guy Marcil - Word MVP
(e-mail address removed)
Word MVP site: http://www.word.mvps.org

 

[rVo]

That's exactly what I want to accomplish. It looks like it can be done (see
posting from Jay Freedman on this subject).
Thanks for your interest.

rVo

 

[rVo]

Thanks a lot Jay, it really does the job.

Place a continuous section break at the end of the multi-column text, and
Word will automatically balance the lengths of the columns.

Depending on the number of columns, the number of lines to be balanced, the
paragraphs' Space Before and Space After, and the hyphenation that's
enabled, one or two columns may be a line long or a line short. If any
paragraphs on the affected page have "Keep together" turned on, that
overrides the column balancing. There's also a compatibility option to
disable balancing ("Don't balance columns for continuous section starts"),
so you need to ensure that it's turned off -- which it is by default.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Jean-Guy Marcil]

rVo was telling us:
rVo nous racontait que :

That's exactly what I want to accomplish. It looks like it can be
done (see posting from Jay Freedman on this subject).
Thanks for your interest.

My bad, I thought you were asking about columns in a table...

Glad to see you got your answer anyway... Thanks Jay for reading this
correctly from the get go!

--
Salut!
_______________________________________
Jean-Guy Marcil - Word MVP
(e-mail address removed)
Word MVP site: http://www.word.mvps.org