Working with Landscape-oriented Pages

When you change the orientation of a section of page to landscape, the header and footer of that section do not change orientation. Instead, the header and footer are at the top and bottom of the page on your screen, but when you print, they are in the left and right margins of the page, not the top and bottom. Any page numbers in the header or footer will appear sideways on the left or right of the printed page. These steps will help you move the page numbers to the appropriate spot and turn them on their side so they print correctly, using Microsoft Word. If you are using older versions of Word, our PDF guide can be downloaded here.

Creating a Landscape Section

  1. Click on the last line of the page before the page you want to have landscape orientation.
  2. On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click on the arrow next to the Breaks icon and select Next Page under the Section Breaks section.
  3. This will create a new page and a section break. If you need to, use the Delete key, not the Backspace key (sometimes called the backwards delete key), on the keyboard to bring the next page’s content back up to the page you are currently on.
  4. Click on the last line of the last page that you want to have landscape orientation (or if you don’t have content yet, press Enter on the keyboard a few times), and repeat steps 2 and 3.
  5. Click anywhere in section you want to have the landscape orientation.
  6. On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click on the arrow next to the Orientation icon and select Landscape. Word understands that you want landscape only for this section.

Disconnecting the Landscape Section

  1. Click somewhere in the first page of the section with landscape pages. On the Insert tab, in the Header & Footer group, click on the arrow next to the Header icon and select Edit Header.
  2. In the Header & Footer tab, in the Navigation group, unlink this section’s Header from previous sections’ headers by clicking the highlighted Link to Previous icon.
  3. Click on the Go to Footer icon and repeat step 3.
  4. Scroll down to the first portrait page following your landscape section and repeat steps 3 and 4 for this section. The goal is to remove all “Same as Previous” tabs from the header and footer of all sections.

You have now disconnected the headers and footers in the sections prior to and following the landscape section of pages. This will prevent any changes you make to the page numbers on the landscape pages from affecting the numbering on other pages.

Adding Page Numbers to the Landscape Page(s)

  1. Delete the page numbers from the footer of the landscape section.
  2. On the Insert tab, in the Header & Footer group, click on the arrow next to the Page Number icon, choose Page Margins, and then in the Plain Number section, choose Large, left (unfortunately, they don’t seem to have just a plain left option).
  3. A large number will now appear in the left margin, and it should be correctly centered.
  4. Highlight the page number and set it to be in the same font type and size as all other page numbers.
  5. In the Shape Format tab, in the Text group, click on Text Direction icon and select Rotate all text 90°.

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