How do you set up columns of text in Microsoft Word? By default there is only one column. Suppose you want part of the document to be three columns and the rest to be one column. The text will flow from top to bottom and then flow to the next column on the right. How do you do that in Word?

First, ensure that Show/Hide is turned on. It’s in the Home menu and is shown here on the left.

Second, select the text that you want to format as three columns. Perhaps it is a paragraph or two. Next, in the ribbon menu, click on Layout, then Columns, then Three. Layout in the the top main menu, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Below is how it will look after creating the three columns.

Each time you go from one column to multiple columns, you need a Section Break (Continuous). You can manually add a section break if you wish, but we didn’t need to do that because Word automatically created a section break before and after our selected text.