I was asked a very good question by a client on Friday, and I think it’s something that is really useful to know 🙂

She had a Word document that was portrait and she wanted to change the orientation to landscape for just one of the pages halfway through.  Sometimes a document needs to be both portrait and landscape, if it contains pictures or tables for example.  Below is a quick guide on how to do this.

We’ll take my terms and conditions as the document.  At the moment it contains 3 pages of portrait orientation.  To start off we’ll make the thumbnails visible so it’s easier to see the separate pages.

Let’s say, for example, we want to insert a landscape page before page 3, how do we do that without changing the whole document?

Firstly we need to insert a blank page, place the cursor at the beginning of the page where you want the new one to be – in this case we’ll put the cursor at the beginning of page 3.  Then go to Insert on the ribbon and click Blank Page.

This will then insert a blank page before the page the cursor is on.  As you can see by the thumbnails, the new page is automatically the same orientation as the one before (portrait).

Changing the orientation of a page usually means going to Page Layout on the ribbon, clicking on orientation and selecting either portrait or landscape.  However, this won’t work in this case as we want to change just 1 page and this method applies to the whole document.

To change just 1 page we first place the cursor after the last word of page 2 then expand the Page Setup menu by clicking on the little arrow in the bottom right corner of the Page Setup section in the Page Layout tab on the ribbon.

This opens up the Page Setup dialogue box.  Make sure the Margins tab is selected and click Landscape under Orientation.  We can see the Preview at the bottom, it is still applying the changes to the whole document so we need to click on the drop down arrow next to Apply To, choose This point forward and click OK.

You’ll see that page 3 has now changed to landscape, but so have the rest of the pages after it.  Insert the picture, table or text that is going onto page 3 then place the cursor at the start of the next page and repeat the step above.  Open the dialogue box in Page Setup, click Portrait, choose Apply to This point forward and click OK.  The rest of the pages should then go back to being portrait leaving you with just page 3 being landscape.

You can see from the thumbnail images if this has worked.

And that’s it – how to change the orientation of individual pages within the same document.

I hope you find it useful 🙂