I want the headings in my multi-column document to span the columns. How can I achieve this?

Article contributed by Suzanne Barnhill  

If you want a heading to span all of your columns, you need only leave it in the single-column section before your multicolumn section. If there isn't a single-column section there already, you'll need to create one – this is easily done by selecting the heading paragraph, clicking on the columns button, and selecting 1 column; Word will then create the necessary Section Breaks for you.

But what if you want a heading to span just some of the columns? In our four-panel brochure example, suppose you want text to span two of the four columns. Once you have four columns, you can't redivide just part of the page into two or three columns. You will therefore need to put your heading text into a text box or frame and position it as needed (the problems of positioning text boxes and frames could provide material for another article, so I won't go into that here).

Whether you use a frame or a text box, it will have a border by default. Remove the border from a frame using the Format | Borders and Shading dialog (select None) or the Borders toolbar button (select No Border). Remove the border from a text box by selecting No Line on the Colors and Lines tab of the Format | Text Box dialog.

Remember that a frame is paragraph formatting; this has interesting consequences. If you insert a frame, type in some text, and apply a heading style, the frame will disappear because you have applied paragraph formatting that does not include a frame. If you type in the heading text, apply a heading style, select the paragraph and use Insert | Frame, you will activate the bug in Word 2002 that creates an invisible formatting combination with the same name as your heading style. The best practice is to first create a new style based on the appropriate heading style and including the frame, then apply the new
heading style to the heading text.

If you use a frame, it doesn't seem to matter whether you set wrapping to None or Around. For a text box, the default wrapping style is None, which will not work (nor will Through). Any other wrapping style seems to be satisfactory. And if the text box extends over two or more whole columns (not just a column or two and a fraction), it won't matter which “Wrap to” setting you choose (and of course if you've chosen “Top & bottom” as the wrapping style, you don't even have this option).

You may want to wait till you're fairly far along in entering text before you insert a text box or frame because the effect of doing this is to reduce the text boundaries to the amount of text you have entered (instead of showing the four rectangles you saw when you first created the columns). This can be rather disconcerting.

See also The strait and narrow – using columns.