Keep text together across page breaks

- [Narrator] One way to improve readability is to make sure that paragraphs don't get broken up across pages or individual lines in a paragraph are not left on their own at the top or bottom of a page. That's what we're going to explore in this movie with our Tech Connect document we've been building, 0403 if you're catching up. When you get to the end of a page and start running out of room, as you continue to add content, eventually Word will add a new page for you and you'll continue typing on that page. Let's just go down to the bottom of our page here.

Just click anywhere down below. You'll see your flashing cursor on the left hand side. Let's type in the word employee spotlight. Watch what happens when you press enter to go down to the next line. It actually takes you to the next page. We ran out of space, Word adds the page, we can continue typing. Let's say we did start typing. Go ahead and type in something like what I have here. You can hit pause if you like to get exactly what I have. Just type in your own text. The point is, what we have at the top here is a heading that belongs with that paragraph and it's separated across what we call a page break.

There are things we can do here in Word to ensure that text is kept together. Either a heading with a paragraph, the first or last line of a paragraph doesn't get stranded on its own page, also known as widows and orphans, even entire paragraphs, we can ensure that they always stay together and never get separated by page breaks. That's what we're going to explore now. Let's start by going up to Employee Spotlight. Click in either the word Employee or Spotlight. Let's use one of the styles, the Heading one style to make it look like the rest of our document.

Go ahead and give it a click up here in the style section. Still it's separate from the content down below. But when we go up here to the paragraph group, again cursor needs to be in Employee or Spotlight, click the little arrow in the bottom right hand corner to open up paragraph settings. It's here where we're going to see a tab for line and page breaks. Go ahead and click that if you need to and you can see for pagination one of these is already checked off, widow and orphan control.

If we had been typing the Cara Davis paragraph without the Employee Spotlight heading, we probably would have seen the first line on page one and then the rest of the paragraph on the next page. This one line by itself up here, might be called a widow and if we saw just the last line of a paragraph on the next page, we could call that an orphan. We can prevent that from happening if this is checked off. What if you want to keep the entire paragraph together so you don't have two lines separated by a page break and then the next two lines.

You can use keep lines together. Clicking there, it's going to ensure that a paragraph doesn't get broken up. Here's the one we want, because we're in the paragraph Employee Spotlight, if we go to keep with next it will automatically keep this paragraph with the next paragraph which is down below. In other words, there's no room for both of them up here. This will get moved down to the next page with the next paragraph. Go ahead, give it a click and now we'll go down to click OK.

See how everything stays together. No matter what we add above or take away, this paragraph and this paragraph will always be together. If we wanted to we could do that for example with this paragraph so it's always with this one. Click anywhere inside the paragraph, go up to the paragraph settings button and keep with next and we click OK. We're not going to see anything change, but if we were to start adding content above this would always show up with the next paragraph thanks to some of the paragraph settings we have at our disposal here in Word 2019.