How to make two columns in Google Docs

How to make two columns in Google Docs

How to make two columns in Google Docs? The era of working from home is upon here, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be moving away any time soon.

This has forced many of us to interact more with technology than we ever thought we would need to. And it brings us to the subject of today, whether you’re looking to benefit from the relatively new feature, or just want to know for general knowledge.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on how to create columns in Google Docs and work on them. This is a feature that many users have demanded quite a while now – well, it’s here!

Google Docs has become booming since the shift to online working. It’s fast, convenient, secure, and lets you work with your peers in real-time.

There are many people that are bound to face problems in this transition, so don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Table of Contents

  1. How to make two columns in Google Docs
    1. Adding columns to just a specific area of the document
  2. Wrap Up

How to make two columns in Google Docs

Organizing your Google Doc with columns is fairly simple. All the tools that you’re going to need are within the application itself! Just follow the steps below to know how to use columns in Google Docs:

  • Open the document you want to work in;
  • Go to the “Format” tab, located on the top. Clicking here will open a drop-down menu;
  • From this menu, hover your cursor over “Columns”. Doing so will open an expanded sub-menu where you will be able to see the options for your page’s formatting;
  • You will notice that it is set to the first option by default. If it’s not obvious from the document itself, you can tell which option is selected because of a slight shadow border across that option. For the purposes of this article, we are going to select the second, or middle, option. This will format your document into two columns.
How to make two columns in Google Docs

Note: You can return your document back to the original format of a single column by selecting the first option from the same “Columns” menu.

An important tool that you may want to check out is the “More options” menu. You can see this at the bottom of the pop-up menu from the 3rd step.

Clicking this will introduce you to more control over the format of your document! You can specify the number of columns you want, adjust the spacing, and even add a line to separate the columns if you want.

How to make two columns in Google Docs

Adding columns to just a specific area of the document

So what if you don’t want to format the entire document into two columns? Just a part of it? Well, you can do just that too.

If you want to format only a specific part of your document, just place your cursor at the text from where you would like it to be split into two columns.

Then, just follow the first fourth steps to create the second column from that point. You can also select and highlight the specific text you want to divide.

Being following this guide so far, there’s a really good chance that you have started to notice something. You can’t type in the second column.

You can try to move your cursor there but it just won’t work if there’s not enough text in that column. So, how do you switch between columns? It’s just as easy!

Follow these steps:

  • Keep the document you are working on open in front of you;
  • Go to the “Insert” tab from the top menu. Clicking this will open up new options for you;
  • From the new list, hover your cursor over “Break”. This will show you another menu, just like before;
  • From this new menu,  click on “Column break”. Doing so will automatically take your cursor to your second column. You can now easily navigate between the columns of your document.
How to make two columns in Google Docs

If there are any mistakes made at any time, you can always return to the default formatting. Just don’t forget where your cursor is when you click on “Format” to change columns.

The changes will be applied to start from the text or position on the document where your cursor lies. This also gives you much more freedom to format the document according to how you want.

Wrap Up

Just to conclude, this feature was only introduced in Google Docs in 2018. It is widely used for writing columns in newspapers and publications.

Now that you know how to make columns in Google Docs, there’s nothing stopping you from having your documents ready to go!

Check out some of our other awesome articles: