Planning Your Document

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If the design of your document is up to you, it's a good idea to start out not at the computer keyboard but at the drawing board, literally sketching out how you want your pages to look. Will you use two columns or three? Do you want them to have equal widths or will one be narrow and the other two wide? Thinking carefully about your document's final appearance will go a long way toward helping you create it that way.

Word gives you the capability of creating up to 12 columns, but in all but the most rare of circumstances (such as a simple word or number list) you won't use 12 columns—the width of each column is a scant 0.5 inch! Most traditional documents use one, two, or three columns. In some instances, you might use four, but even those columns provide little room for more than a few small words on a line.

As you prepare your document plan, consider these questions:

• How many columns do you want? Table 9-1 lists the column widths Word uses by default for the first six multi-column choices of an 8.5-by-11-inch portrait page.
• Will you include graphics around which your columns need to flow?
• How much space do you want to leave between columns?
• Do you want your columns to be of equal width or varied?
• Will you include a table of contents column that might require more space than a traditional text column?
• Do you want the column settings to extend the full length of the page, or do you want to include a section at the top of the page that is only a single column?

Table 9-1. Word's Default Column Widths

Number of Columns	Width of Each Column
1	6.0 inches
2	2.75 inches with 0.5 spacing
3	1.78 inches with 0.33 spacing
4	1.32 inches with 0.24 spacing
5	1.05 inches with 0.19 spacing
6	0.87 inches with 0.16 spacing