HOW TO : Combine landscape and portrait page layouts in Microsoft Word

Blogging this as a “memory” note for myself 🙂

I was putting together a report for work and needed one of the pages in the word document to be in landscape mode, instead of the regular portrait mode. I thought it was a simple thing of adding a page break and applying the “landscape” layout in the page setup. But ended up either having all pages in landscape mode or in portrait mode. A bit of googling finally helped out :). Looks like the trick is to use section breaks instead of page breaks.

Here are the steps to do it in Microsoft Word 2010

1. Add the content you want into word. In this example, I created two paragraphs, test landscape and test portrait 
2. At the place you want to split the page format, insert a section break, by going to Page Layout –> Breaks –> Section Breaks –> Next Page 
3. Now change the page orientation by going to Page Layout -> Orientation –> Landscape. This will only change the orientation for the current section.
4. And voila you document now has two different page orientations 🙂