Is arbitrary 1st page formatting in Mac Word 2016 w/text flow possible?
October 2, 2019 3:05 PM Subscribe
I am trying to stop having to manually format each of my work letters that are longer than a page. To do that I need Word to act more like a page layout program, and let me have the body text on the first page have a different indent than the rest of the documents — regardless of where the first page breaks relative to the text on it. Can I bludgeon Word into doing this?
So far as I can tell the typical use of Sections won't work because they're defined by a place in the text, whereas I want the front page to have different formatting, arbitrarily, and have the text flow into the different formatting of the second page.
I can't just set a different first page margin, as far as I know, because I want to use the full width of the page for other elements, like the header and address block.
For reference, I am trying to construct a letter template where the first page ONLY looks like the "alternate" style on this page [pdf], but the rest of the document has more normal layout and not have to manually reformat every document every time an edit changes where the first page breaks.
Things I've thought about:
-Columns — will Word let me make the first page ONLY have columns, and then flow the text into the rest of the body after that? So far as I can tell, this relies on sections too, so you can't just cut and paste the entire body of a document, or paste text into a blank template and have it work.
-Tables — A table with a fixed size could work to set the "body" area for the front page, but so far as I can tell you can't flow text from a table cell into the body after the table.
-Text Boxes - As of Mac Word 2016, it seems you can create arbitrary text boxes and link them, like in a page layout program. But so far as I can tell, there's no way to flow text from a text box into the body. So I guess I'd have to create a very long multi-page template with blank text boxes pre-positioned and linked and then delete the unused pages every time?
Can the "different first page" function be abused for this somehow? Or is there a better way to do this in Mac Word? I have O365 but am not willing to go back to Windows just to try to make this work with the kinds of VBA macro suites I don't miss using or paying for, or give up the rest of my Mac workflows to use Publisher.
So far as I can tell the typical use of Sections won't work because they're defined by a place in the text, whereas I want the front page to have different formatting, arbitrarily, and have the text flow into the different formatting of the second page.
I can't just set a different first page margin, as far as I know, because I want to use the full width of the page for other elements, like the header and address block.
For reference, I am trying to construct a letter template where the first page ONLY looks like the "alternate" style on this page [pdf], but the rest of the document has more normal layout and not have to manually reformat every document every time an edit changes where the first page breaks.
Things I've thought about:
-Columns — will Word let me make the first page ONLY have columns, and then flow the text into the rest of the body after that? So far as I can tell, this relies on sections too, so you can't just cut and paste the entire body of a document, or paste text into a blank template and have it work.
-Tables — A table with a fixed size could work to set the "body" area for the front page, but so far as I can tell you can't flow text from a table cell into the body after the table.
-Text Boxes - As of Mac Word 2016, it seems you can create arbitrary text boxes and link them, like in a page layout program. But so far as I can tell, there's no way to flow text from a text box into the body. So I guess I'd have to create a very long multi-page template with blank text boxes pre-positioned and linked and then delete the unused pages every time?
Can the "different first page" function be abused for this somehow? Or is there a better way to do this in Mac Word? I have O365 but am not willing to go back to Windows just to try to make this work with the kinds of VBA macro suites I don't miss using or paying for, or give up the rest of my Mac workflows to use Publisher.
Do you know about inserting page breaks?
posted by freethefeet at 4:26 AM on October 5, 2019
posted by freethefeet at 4:26 AM on October 5, 2019
Response by poster: Yes, but that causes the page to break relative to a point in the text, i.e. you can't replace the body of a letter filled with lorem ipsum (or line breaks) with actual text and have the formatting remain because the cut-and-paste will kill all the formatting.
Basically, rather than trying to sculpt the document I needed to make a mold.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:12 AM on October 5, 2019
Basically, rather than trying to sculpt the document I needed to make a mold.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:12 AM on October 5, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
Rather than trying to make a container for the text on the front page that could be arbitrarily positioned but flow into the body, the way to go was to put a blank object on the front page to serve as an obstacle.
Then text wrap can be used for the desired effect.
But if there's a better way yet I'm all ears!
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:45 PM on October 2, 2019