This article explains how to add and remove hyphenation in a Word document, and how to work with the options you have in the hyphenation menu.

Why would I want to add hyphens to a document?

This issue doesn’t normally come up with standard documents where the text is in a smallish size and extends across the entire width of the page. In fact I hardly ever see it in the work I do, and was only reminded of it when a client had accidentally set automated hyphenation in part of his document that happened to contain long words. Where did all these hyphens come from, I wondered.

It is useful, however, if you are working with columns, say in a table, or for a newsletter you’re publishing, or some other part of a document where you want to have a narrow band of text running down the page. If you just put your text in your column and don’t justify it on the right hand side, you will end up with a very ragged look:

In fact, as you can see (marked by the arrow), one word is just too long for the line and splits at the last letter, something which doesn’t obey any of the standard rules of hyphenation (I bet this has happened in your tables – it has in my clients’).

Maybe we can neaten it up by applying Right Justification …

Oh no! In its effort to make everything tidy, Word has carefully inserted huge spaces between words (unlike someone typesetting properly on a computer or by hand, it doesn’t space out the letters in the words so much as just add massive spaces). And poor old Mr Long Word is still dangling a letter onto the next line.

This looks pretty horrible, doesn’t it. Adding automatic or manual hyphenation is the way forward.

How do I add automatic hyphenation to my Word document?

To work with the hyphenation options, we need to be in the Page Layout tab, and the Page Setup area, and there you’ll find Hyphenation (with a little pop-up box explaining it). This is the case in Word 2007 and Word 2010. In Word 2003, you need to select the following menus: Tools > Language > Hyphenation.

If you click on the arrow to the left of the word Hyphenation, you get a menu that looks like this:

You can choose here between None, Automatic and Manual, and then have some options, too. We’ll look at those options in a moment.

What happens if I add automatic hyphenation to my document?

If you highlight the text and then select Automatic from the Hyphenation menu, Word will automatically insert hyphens into the text to break the words in sensible, permitted places (there is a whole art to this which I will discuss another time. I’m not sure which exact rules Word follows, but a quick look shows that it’s pretty good). So if your text is right justified, you’ll get this:

You can see here that Word has hyphenated all of the longer words that previously caused those big gaps, and made the text an awful lot tidier.

You can do this on unjustified text, too:

but I personally think that this still looks a bit messy.

How do I remove automatic hyphenation?

To remove automatic hyphenation when you find it in a document and don’t want it, highlight the offending text and choose None from the Hyphenation menu in Page Layout > Page Setup:

All of the automatic hyphenation should disappear.

How do I use manual hyphenation in my document?

If you choose the manual hyphenation option, based on where your cursor is placed at the time you select this option, Word will give you a choice of where and whether to hyphenate your words:

(here we can see our unhyphenated text, with the cursor on “demonstrate”). Once you’ve clicked on Yes or No, it will hop along to the next word that’s a candidate for hyphenation.

Why shouldn’t I just hyphenate totally manually?

Of course, you can just look for gaps and manually type a hyphen in the middle of the word, and it will split over two lines. However, this is a concrete character that you’ve inserted into the word, and so if you change the wording in your text so that the offend-ing word no longer comes at the end of the line, you’ll retain the hyphen charac-ter and get artefacts like the ones you can see in this para-graph. Much better to automate the manual process, so to speak …

What are the hyphenation options?

If you click on the Hyphenation Options at the bottom of the Hyphenation dialogue box, you are given a few choices:

Working from the top …

• Automatically hyphenate document – does what it says on the tin
• Hyphenate words in CAPS – you may not want to split long acronyms, etc. – if not, then untick this box
• Hyphenation zone – this is the maximum space allowed between a word and the right hand margin. Increase this number and the hyphenation zone becomes wider – and you will have fewer hyphens. A lower number will give you more hyphens
• Limit consecutive hyphens to – allows you to prevent Word from hyphenating at the end of every line – best adjusted once you’ve set hyphenation and seen what it looks like
• Manual… – gives you another way to get to the Manual Hyphenation feature

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In this article we’ve learned why we might want to apply automatic hyphenation to a document, how we do it, how to remove automatic hyphenation, and the options that are available in the hyphenation menu.

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Do like and share as much as you can, and/or leave me a comment if this article has been useful to you.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

We’re already learned the basics of adding page numbers to a Word document, and now we’re going to look at some more things you can do with page numbers, including:

• how to stop your first page displaying a page number
• how to have page numbers in different formats in your document

This will be particularly useful if you’re formatting the page numbers on a PhD or other thesis or dissertation – many of my student clients don’t know how to do this, which is what inspired me to write this series of articles.

How can I have different page number formats in different parts of my document?

Imagine that you’ve written a thesis or a book – something that has a title page (red), a contents list (blue) and then the main body of the text (yellow). It’ll look something like this …

Now imagine that you’d like to have different page numbering for different parts of the document – for example, no page numbering on the title page, Roman numerals for the contents pages, and then the numbering continuing in Arabic numerals for the main body of the text. Look at a non-fction book or someone else’s thesis and you’ll see that this is how they’re often laid out.

How do you do this? First of all, you need to divide your document into discrete sections, using section breaks. Let’s learn how to do that …

How do I see what formatting I have in my document?

If you plan to insert section or other breaks in a document, it’s useful to be able to see what breaks you have in there already. In the document I’m using an example, I would suspect that the aurhor has added some sort of breaks to make the contents page and then main text start on new pages.

How do we check this? Make sure you’re on the Home tab and then press the Paragraph button in the Paragraph section …

Once you’ve pressed the button, you’ll find all sorts of strange marks appear. You can also see that the new page has been started by inserting a Page Break (and not using the Enter key – hooray. If you want to know the reason for the “hooray”, read this article.

The paragraph mark indicates a return, and the Page Break label shows that a page break has been inserted here. That’s great if you just want to start the next chunk of text on the next page, but we want to format each section differently, and this requires a section break rather than just a page break.

How do I insert a section break?

In order to insert a Section Break, we need to delete the page break first. Highlight the page break and press the Delete key or place the cursor just to the right of it and press the Backspace button. As soon as you do that, you’ll notice that the text which sat neatly at the top of the next page has jumped up onto this page. Don’t worry, it will disappear again …

To insert the Section Break, you need to be in the Page Layout tab (not the Insert tab, confusingly). There you will find an area called Page Setup which includes a Breaks menu:

When you press the Breaks button, you’ll see a menu offering several different options for the break you wish to insert – including our old friend the page break and our new friend the section break.

The one we want is Section Break – Next Page. As the text explains, this will insert a Section Break and start the next chunk of text on the next page – exactly what we want to do. Choose that option and hey presto …

… a Section Break (Next Page) appears on your page. And the Contents page has moved back to Page 2.

Note that in this example, we’re dividing the document into three sections, using two section breaks, so we need to add one at the end of the contents list, too …

So now our document is divided into three sections – 1, the title page, 2, the contents list and 3. the main body of the text:

How do I add different formats of numbers to different sections of my document?

Now it’s time to add those page numbers, remembering that we want no page numbers at all on the title page, the Roman numerals on the conents pages followed by Arabic numerals for the rest of the document.

We’ve seen how to add page numbers before, using the Headers and Footers on the document. We’ll do that in a moment. But this time we need to do something else first: we need to remove the association between each section and make tat sure each one is independent. This will allow us to assign different page number formats to each section (and other formatting – I’ll write about this another time, but it’s the way you get your document to let you have certain pages in landscape rather than portrait orientation, etc.

How do I stop my footer having the same format as the previous section?

The trick here is to make sure that the footers do not simply copy the previous section of the document. if they do, you will have trouble making each section different. We now need to go into the second section of the document and disconnect its footers from those of the first section.

So, first of all, go into the Design tab or just left click on the bottom part of your page, below the text. In both cases, the Design tab will display and you need to look at the Navigation area. You will see that the footer automatically decides to be Same as Previous – we need to disconnect this footer from the previous one. Up in the Ribbon, Link to Previous is highlighted, reminding us that this section’s footer is linked to the previous one and providing a handy hint as to how to stop that.

If you press the Link to Previous button it will turn from yellow back to white, you’ll notice that the Link to Previous note in fhe footer has disappeared. This means that you can format Section 2 independently of whatever’s going on in Section 1,

Note that the Header has its own ability to Link to Previous, which is separate from that of the Footer, which means that you can keep any header text you’ve added to the document working throughout the document without needing to re-insert it into each section.

Before we start getting excited about adding those page numbers, make sure you’ve done the same to Section 3, disconnecting it from Section 2. Changing Same as previous in one section won’t have any effect on the next section:

Remind me how to add page numbers …

Now we’re ready to add the page numbers to the document. Ignoring Section 1, which doesn’t need a page number, we can go into the page number add part of Section 2. Just to remind you, that’s on the Page Number area of the Design tab, and in this case we want to add a page number at the bottom of hte page, so we select Page Number then Bottom of Page and the particular position we require, so as to set up the page number position before formatting the actual numbers.

Now it’s time to format the page numbers. So its back to the Page Number button but we choose Format Page Numbers …

You will see on this example that the page number has automatically inserted itself on the first page of the contents (Page 2 of the document), but it has defaulted to being in Arabic numbers and to helpfully inform us that we’re on page 2 of the document. However, we want Roman numerals, AND we want it to start with Page 1. So, into that Page Number format menu, and there we can …

… choose Roman numerals (top) and start at page 2, not page 2. Press OK to set those …

And look – as if by magic, the page number is now i instead of 2.

Now, for section 3, the main body of the text, we want Arabic numerals which continue from the last number in Section 2. So in this case we choose the Number Format to be the default, Arabic, opion, and tick Continue from previous section. In this screenshot, I’ve already pressed OK, so look at the bottom of the page …

and there’s a lovely figure three.

So, to you what weve done in a colourful and dramatic way which is a bit more over the top than what we would actually want our document to look like, we’ve done this:

And while individual institutions’ formatting rules still take precedence, this is what most of my PhD students like their thesis page numbering to look like.

In this article we’ve learned how to add different kinds of page number to different parts of the document, and more complicated formats for page numbers. If you need more of a recap on the basics of page numbering, see the article on that topic.

If you have found this article useful, please share it using the buttons below, and leave me a comment!

If you’re at all interested in my anti-cholesterol diet book which I used as an example in this document, find out more here.

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

This article is going to teach you the basics of adding page numbers to a Word document, using Word 2007 or Word 2010. Later articles in the series will tackle more complicated topics such as mixing Roman and Arabic numerals and making sure your first page doesn’t have a number if you don’t want it to.

Why add page numbers to a Word document?

Good question? You might have a perfectly nice, short document, that looks a bit like this ..

And you don’t really need to add page numbers. But what if it’s going to be a book, or you’re going to introduce a contents page or index? What if people are going to want to quote from it, or refer back to a particular section? Even though if they read your document on their Kindle, they might not be able to see the page numbers, these are all good reasons why you might want to give your readers some page numbers to help them navigate their way through your text.

Where are the menus and buttons for adding page numbers?

As usual, there are a couple of ways to access the menus and buttons you need for adding page numbers. But, again, as usual, they lead to the same place in the end.

Method One involves choosing the Insert tab. Once you’re there, you’ll find a section called Header & Footer, and there’s your Page Numbers button:

Method Two involves clicking with your left mouse button in the blank space at the bottom (or top) of your page. Another way to do this is to select the Design tab, but sometimes that doesn’t show up by default. Clicking on the blank bit of the page will bring up the Headers and Footers and your Page Numbers button:

In Word 2003, you can find the page numbers options in the Header and Footer menu.

Now you’ve found the Page Numbers button, it all stays the same from now on, and its menu looks like this:

We’ll look at how to position your page numbers, and then how to format them (it’s best to do it this order).

How do I choose the position of my page numbers?

You will find two options for positioning your page numbers:

1. At the top or bottom of the page

2. Elsewhere in the page margins

To choose the position of the page numbers in the top or bottom areas of the page, choose Top of Page or Bottom of Page (the positions are identical for the two). Here we choose Top of Page:

You can see lots of options for positioning your page numbers, including that fancy “Page 3 of 12” you’ve seen on other people’s documents. To select the position, click on the example that suits you best (you can scroll down for even more choices).

If you try out Page Margins, you will be given another set of options allowing you to insert your page numbers all over the place:

Again, you can scroll down for even more options.

I find that people have one or two favoured number positions and ignore the others (in much the same way that we only use two programmes on our washing machines). But it’s useful to know how to find all those extra places, in case you’re working collaboratively or with a client who has particular preferences.

Now we’ll look at some basics of formatting your page numbers.

How do I format my page numbers?

This is best done once you’ve decided on the page number position, and you can come back and format them at any time, by finding and clicking on the Page Numbers button. We’re just going to look at the basics here, with more complex choices being discussed next time.

To format the page numbers, find the Page Numbers button and choose Format Page Numbers:

Select Format Page Numbers and you’ll find some more options for changing your page numbers from Arabic to Roman (or Roman capitals) and for where to start the numbering:

If you drop down the Number format list, you’ll find your choices laid out. You are not likely to want to use anything other than straight Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3 …) if you are just using one numbering style for the whole document; the others will come in handy when we learn how to apply different numeral styles to difference sections of the text. But the choices are there:

Again, Chapter numbering and Continue from previous section / Start at are mainly used when you’re applying different numbering styles to different parts of your document (Roman numerals for the contents page and foreword, Arabic for the main text, etc.) but it’s worth knowing where to find these choices for next time.

So, let’s summarise and look at how to apply standard, straightforward page numbering to a document.

How do I apply standard page numbering to my document?

If you just want simple numbers in Arabic numerals at, say, the bottom right hand corner of each page, here’s how you do it.

First, click on the Page Numbers button and choose Bottom of Page, then select the example that best fits where you want your page numbers to appear:

Then, choose Format Page Numbers and make sure your options are set to Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3 … and page numbering to start at 1:

Once you’ve pressed OK, you will be back in the Footer of your document, with the main text still in grey and the page number in black, because you’re in the Footer, not the main text:

Left click on the body of the text, and the page will reverse – the Footer indicator will disappear, your text will be in black and your number will be in grey, because it’s part of the Footer, not of the text:

How do I insert different types of page number into one document?

In this article we’ve learned how to find the Page Numbers button and how to position the page numbers on the page and format them into different kinds of number. In Part 2 of this series, we look at adding different kinds of page number to different parts of the document, and more complicated formats for page numbers.

If you have found this article useful, please share it using the buttons below, and leave me a comment!

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …