Introducing sections and advanced layouts in Writer ✨

The ability to create sections—separate parts with independent layouts and properties unique to the rest of the document—is something a lot of you have been requesting for a while now.

The reason for the delay also explains the complexity of the feature. After a couple of years of relentless work on this, we’re excited to announce multi-sections and advanced layout options in Writer. 🎉

Here’s what this update enables in Writer:

1. Change orientation for selected pages
Dividing documents into multiple “sections” means you can treat each section almost like a different document altogether—like setting one page in portrait, while the others remain in landscape.

2. Add cover pages
Cover pages in documents usually have completely different margins, border settings, and themes than the rest of the document.

With this new update, all you have to do is insert a section break after the cover page, and none of the changes you make to the properties of your cover page will affect the rest of the document.

3. Have multiple columns in between the document
Create professional layouts for your documents by making a part of a page or document have multiple columns. For example, think of how newspapers, newsletters, and magazine pages are set up.

4. Do more with text boxes
Along with the sections update, we also rebuilt our TextBox feature from ground up, closing the gap it previously had with normal text in the document. Advanced Formatting options, Track Changes, Find & Replace, and spelling and grammar suggestions now all work inside textboxes as well.

5. Precise positioning and anchoring of images
Images in a document can now be placed with pixel-perfect precision. There are easy presets for users looking to place the images directly in the center of the page, in the corner, or aligned to any of the margins in the document.

For the more advanced users, there are custom positioning options to input precise calculations as well.

That’s all for now. We’re glad to enter into this new decade with a feature so many users have been asking us for. How do you like these new updates? Let us know in the comments below, or on the Writer Community forum.
Happy writing!