Sections

[Senthil Kumar]

Can anybody (If you have the time!) explain what are
sections for in Word and how to use them? I know It is
going to be a tough and long reply but pardon me!

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

While this may not be complete, I'll start the ball rolling.

Sections are used for dividing the document so that features that are
related to the Section object can be applied to different parts of the
document. Such features are primarily those associated with the Page Setup,
such as

- Page size e.g. A3, A4, Envelopes
- Page Orientation - Portrait or Landscape
- Margins
- Vertical Alignment - Top, Centre, Bottom
- Headers and Footers
- Page Numbering - Restart or Continue from Previous Section; include
Chapter/Section number with page number e.g. 1 -1, 1 -2 etc.

All of the above can be setup on a Section by Section basis so that they
differ from one Section to another.

--
Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Senthil

Everything Doug said is true. So let me take a completely different point of
view, and consider what sections are *not* used for.

You can imagine a document that includes several major headings. So you may
be writing about transport, and you could have major headings like Cars,
Railways, Airlines. Your material is grouped in some meaningful way under
these headings. We could imagine the heading Cars and the text under the
Cars heading as being a unit. Word has no formal term for such a thing, but
let's say that the content between the beginning of one heading and the
beginning of the next heading is a "chapter". So a "chapter" is a semantic
idea. It's about how the text is constructed and how we group text in a
meaningful way.

A section in Word terms has no semantic use. Sections are entirely about
formatting, as Doug explained: margins, page orientation, headers and
footers, columns, borders and so on. So one "chapter" might span several
sections. And one section might span several "chapters". Sections and
"chapters" are fundamentally unrelated to one another.

I think this distinction matters because in ordinary language we might refer
to the Cars section, and we would be referring to the Cars heading and the
text under that heading. But a Word section is about formatting, not about
meaning. You don't need a new Word section for every "chapter".

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word