From the course: Word 2016 Essential Training

Keeping text together across page breaks

From the course: Word 2016 Essential Training

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Keeping text together across page breaks

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- Have you ever been reading a document and you arrived at the bottom of the page and see a single line all by itself, and then on the next page, you find the rest of that paragraph? Or maybe the reverse is true, you're reading down to the bottom of the page and you go to the next page and there's a single line at the top of the page all by itself and it belongs with the paragraph on the previous page? That's what we call widows and orphans, that one line all by itself. For readability, you should try to avoid that, and that's why we're going to look at widow and orphan control in this movie, as well as other ways to keep paragraph text together. And we're going to do it with our LH_press_release document, 0403, if you need to get caught up. Let's scroll down to the bottom of page one. We do see a paragraph getting split up here. "Event planners and conference organizers," the next line, and then the last three lines of the paragraph are on the next page. So it makes sense then, if we were to click after the phone number in the previous paragraph and add an extra line, then we should end up with a single line in this paragraph, and the second line should move down to the next page. Let's see what happens, hold down shift and press enter. Well, what actually happens is both lines get pushed down, and that's because of something known as widow and orphan control. It's turned on in this document, and specifically for the paragraph we're working with. So let's click undo or press control Z on your keyboard to undo what we just did. And click anywhere in the paragraph that starts with "Event planners and conference organizers." Next, we'll go up to the paragraph group and click the expansion arrow on the bottom right-hand corner to access the Paragraph dialog and select the Line and Page Breaks tab up here at the top. You'll notice that widow and orphan control is checked off, and that's why that happened. If we were to deselect it by clicking the checkbox and click OK, and then try that again, click after the phone number, hold down your shift key and press enter, you can see we do end up with a single line of that paragraph that's kind of stranded from the rest and it doesn't look right. So again, we'll click undo or Control Z and go back into this paragraph and consider putting widow and orphan control back on, or maybe we just want to keep the entire paragraph together. Let's go back to the expansion arrow, Give that a click. With the Paragraph dialog opened up and Line and Page Breaks tab selected, we'll turn that on. Yeah, that's a good idea and it should always be on. In fact, if you were to create a new document, you'll probably see that this is the default, it's turned on. But by selecting keep lines together and clicking OK, look what happens. The entire paragraph is moved to the next page. Those lines will always be kept together and never split up, whether it's a single line, two lines, three lines, et cetera. I like that feature. Another option is to always keep certain paragraphs together. For example, this heading "ABOUT THE LANDON HOTEL SAN FRANCISCO," that's considered a paragraph, and so is the next one. Maybe we want to make sure these two stay together so we never see this all by itself. So click anywhere in the heading, "ABOUT THE LANDON HOTEL SAN FRANCISCO," go back up to the expansion arrow in the Paragraph group and in this case, we want to keep this paragraph together with the next paragraph, that's what "Keep with next" means right here. So when you click OK, you can rest assured that these two will never be split up. If we run out of space, all four of these lines, the two lines in the second paragraph, the one line up here and the space in between will be moved to the next page. And in fact, if we wanted to keep these with the next paragraph, we could repeat the process by going to the next paragraph, "Nestled between a yoga studio," and repeating that process, expanding, keep with next and click OK. Now all three of these paragraphs will always be together and never split up by a page break. Another option you may have noticed when we expand the Paragraph group here is page break before. So instead of pushing it down to the next page, you can see there's a page break before option which will move the page break up a little bit, just another way to make sure that when a page break occurs, it's not going to be splitting up your content, and that's going to improve your readability. Let's click cancel and move back to the top of our document.

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