15 Create a Multicolumn Newsletter

When you want to create newspaper-style columns ”such as those that appear in newsletters and brochures ”configure Writer to format your text with multiple columns. You can assign multiple columns to the entire document or to only sections. By applying multiple columns to certain sections, you'll be able to span a headline across the top of two or three columns of text underneath.

Before You Begin

10 About the Rulers

13 Apply Paragraph Formatting

See Also

16 About Styles and Templates

1. Type the Document
   
   Create your initial document without worrying about column placement. Type your headline and other text using Writer's default styles and formats.
   
   

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   Generally , you should type your document's text before breaking the document into multiple columns.

   
2. Format the Headline
   
   Change your headline's format to match the style you want your newsletter to take on. Not all multicolumn documents have headlines across the top of the columns, but many do.
   
   

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   If you routinely write a newsletter or other multicolumned document, you may want to create a template that contains your headline and column layout and then apply that template to create each issue. For more, see 16 About Styles and Templates .

3. Select Text for Columns
   
   Select all the text that will be converted to multiple columns. This generally begins immediately following your headline.
   
   
4. Request a Section Change
   
   Select Insert, Section from the menu bar. This menu option is slightly misleading. You are actually converting the selected text to a new document section because you selected the text before selecting the Section option.
   
   

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   Turn on nonprinting characters to ensure that you don't select any part of the headline. Start selecting following the headline's nonprinting paragraph character.

   Click the Columns tab in the resulting dialog box.
   
   
5. Select Columns
   
   You can select the number of columns you want by clicking to change the number in the Columns list. Generally, it's quicker to click the thumbnail image that displays the number of columns you want to convert to. The options beneath the Settings section enable you to precisely adjust each column's width and the space between them. Generally, Writer's default width and spacing values work well.
   
   Feel free to select a separating line by selecting from the Line drop-down menu. Each option provides a different line width that will appear between your columns. You can also specify, from the Height option, if you want the line to run the entire column length ( 100% ) or less.
   
   
6. Make Final Edits
   
   Once your document appears in columns, you'll almost certainly need to make some final adjustments. For example, with three or more columns, the text becomes lumpy with too many spaces between the words if you've justified the columns. Newspapers often use full justification, but they suffer from this extra spacing at times. Most of the time, columns that you left-justify look the best with three or more columns. Also, subheadings that you formatted before converting to multiple columns may be too large in their columns, so you can decrease the font size of such subheadings (see 12 Apply Character Formatting ).