It’s a little hard to explain. And I know the right answer is something cheeky like “Learn 2 LateX” but Word is what I’m using and I haven’t the time to learn a whole new system for just this one thing.
Anyway, I’m trying to put together a book. Major book section headings are on their own page. I want them centered vertically. But when I highlight a heading and say to center it vertically, it sometimes centers that heading vertically and always centers the next two pages vertically. This is for each major section heading I try this with.
Any idea what’s happening and how I can fix it?
The major section headings have their own special “Heading 1” format tag, and the following two pages each contain a sub-heading with a “Heading 2” format tag followed by text with the “normal” tag. But subsequent pages ALSO have this “heading 2 followed by normal” formatting, so this is not what is making those two pages in particular behave strangely.
Maybe this is all relevant somehow, I don’t know.
Happy to share the file with anyone who is interested in taking a look for themselves.
Err never mind some of that. I was completely wrong about it just being the following two pages. It just happened that the third pages I looked at all had all rows of text filled and I didn’t notice this, I just noticed the text didn’t move.
So actually what it’s doing is centering THE WHOLE DOCUMENT. I can select an option to apply the effect to the whole document or apply it “from this point forward.” But I don’t see an option to apply it just to the selected text!
I’m in page layout–>page setup–>layout.
I take it, I guess, this is meant for stuff that applies only to the whole document. Well, how can I vertically align just particular sections?
ETA: There is also page layout–>arrange–>align, but all the alignment options there are greyed out.
Do you understand Word’s concept called “sections”? If not you need to learn about that.
Most of the page-level formatting you’re talking about is applied uniformly throughout a section. The way to get different page-level formatting is to break the content into multiple sections and apply the desired formatting to the appropriate section.
“Styles”, which you’re mis-calling “format tags” apply only formatting scoped at paragraph-level and below.
So what you eventually want is to create one section for the first chapter header page, then a section for the first chapter content, then a section for the second chapter header page, then a section for the second chapter content, then …
With maybe additional section(s) at the front for front matter and section(s) at the back for tail matter.
Sections are used in addition to, not instead of, paragraph styles such as heading 1, normal text, etc.