Template with Section Breaks

[Lyn]

I am working with a template that was developed for my
company by a contractor. There are continuous section
breaks throughout the document (eg, after every heading,
etc). I think these are serving some purpose and I don't
want to go ahead and delete them until I figure out why
they are there. Does anyone know?

Thanks.

Lyn

 

[Margaret Aldis]

Hi Lyn

I know very little about using fill-in fields either, but if you have them
in your document, that is probably exactly what the section breaks are for.

See http://www.computorcompanion.com/LMMArticle.asp?ID=22 for information
from an expert. There are also some FAQs on the http://www.mvps.org/word
site that cover issues arising from form protection.

--
Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP
Syntagma partnership site: http://www.syntagma.co.uk
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word

Margaret,
Thanks so much for the speedy and comprehensive
response. Protection for forms might come into play
here...[Insert Text] is used throughout the document. I
know very little about using the fill in fields. Does
that warrant the use of section breaks?
Thanks again!

Lyn

-----Original Message-----
Hi Lyn

One possibility is that the template started life as a document converted
from WordPerfect - I believe that process often creates a lot of unnecessary
section breaks.

The normal reasons for using continuous section breaks are either changes to
left and right margins (usually better accomplished using paragraph indents
in Word) and changes to numbers of columns (for instance, maybe the design
started with two column layout and spanning headings, even if since then it
has been changed back). (I'm assuming protection for forms won't be relevant
here?)

The first thing to do is to look and see if you can see any differences in
the page layout settings or in the column settings in the different
sections. If not, you could try deleting the breaks in a copy of the
template and see whether that causes any problems in practice. Remember that
each section break stores information for the section *above*, and when you
delete it you will change that formatting (**including the section start
setting**) to that defined by the next following section break in the file.

Worth reading http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Formatting/WorkWithSections.
htm
first.

Hope this helps

--
Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP
Syntagma partnership site: http://www.syntagma.co.uk
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word





.

 

[Jim Albury]

We created a template in our organization, but we put
section break (Next Page)s at the end of each subdocument
to control page numbering. This way we can have different
page number locations on the first page of each section
when the master document assembles all the subdocuments.
Perhaps the section breaks you see are there for a similar
purpose.

You're correct in not wanting to delete them. Unlike
ordinary page breaks (which separate content), a section
break carries with it formatting information about the
nearby pages and can cause challenges when they're deleted
and need to be reinserted.

I hope that helps.

- Jim