The next tool in our list I'd like to tackle are page breaks and section breaks. And we'll also look at scene breaks while we're there too, because you may have missed that section earlier. So first up, we're probably going to be making page breaks every time we have a new chapter. Here's Cleopatra in the background, if you hear she's the white cat, we may see her later. Okay, so as we're scrolling through our document, it's possible that you've got a scene break in here that when you were typing your three asterisks to separate one scene from another, if you accidentally pressed enter at the end of that, what might might have happened on your screen is this line of dots that filled the error and you might not even be able to delete it as easily as that if you didn't have a line blank in front of it.

So I want to show you quickly the way to turn that off if you did accidentally get it because you You don't even know what it is really, it's a border line. And that is located in the paragraph settings area on the borders tool, just grab your drop down arrow and choose no border. And that will get rid of that border in the middle there. And then you're free to start again, with your three asterisks. So I'm going to back it up to the very beginning of the line, type 123 asterisks. And I'm going to turn on centering, because I think that will make it the most clear to see and instead of having a blank line ahead and a blank line below, I want to teach you a quick way to add space above and below the paragraph that will allow it to be uniform throughout your document.

Whether it's happening between two paragraphs on the same page, or paragraphs that happen to split a page there and your scene break is in the middle. So what I'd like you to do is highlight your scene break, it could be three asterisks, or maybe you want to use a symbol or some picture. Either way, come over, you can do this in a couple of different places, you can do it from the More button on the paragraph control. And I'd like you to add 12 points of space before and 12 points of space after your scene break and click OK. Notice that it now makes a uniform height of space above and below your scene break. Lovely right that makes it very easy. If you're not familiar with that more button on the paragraph setting or you can't remember it later.

You can also find this feature on the Layout tab near the center of the toolbar here with the before and after paragraph spacing. So we're just going to add 12 points of space above the scene break and below the scene break And remember from our earlier video, we want to make sure that it's truly centered. So if the first line indent was still on and you have this hanging arrow there, just grab it on your ruler and drag it back to the left so that you have true centering on your scene break. Great. I'm going to take us back to the Home tab since that's where we're usually stay. And then I'm going to scroll less down until we get to the spot where chapter two begins.

If you're anything like many of my author friends, when you finish one chapter and begin another, you just press enter a few times to bring it down the page to start again. Or maybe you're like some of my other author friends who Press Enter just far enough that it will come down to the beginning of the next page all by itself, and in some cases, that's a very, very long way to go. So what I want you to do instead is turn on that paragraph show hide feature that we used earlier. I want you to select all of those blank lines that you may have have dropped in there. And I want us to part ways with them just for the moment and I'm going to show you a smarter way to format your document for this next element. We can turn this off if it bothers you, I'm going to leave it on for just a moment more.

To keep showing us what's going on on our screen. We're going to now add something called a page break, which flows between sections of the document. This is located on the Layout tab, and it's toward the left hand side in our page setup area, and it's under breaks. Click on that drop down arrow, and choose either Page Break, or section break. Next page, I'll tell you a little bit about the why you might choose one versus the other. a page break will simply mark the page at which one page ends and the next begins.

So in your view screen, you will see chapter one and on its own page and then you'll flip over scroll down to the next page chapter two and on that next page of the document, if you don't need to do anything fancy, with headers or footers that have a different first page than the pages that follow, then a simple page break is all you need. In ebooks. This is often the case because we don't even really have headers and footers in ebooks, with very few exceptions, because who knows if you're going to be reading it on a small screen, like a cell phone, or a larger screen, like a tablet, or a computer monitor, which could be really quite large these days. So in ebooks, page breaks are typically sufficient. If you're formatting for print, though, you may want to consider having the beginnings of your chapters look special, in which case, it might not contain a page number or it might not contain a header.

So you may want to use section break next page breaks if you think you want to do something fancy With headers and footers later on, we'll leave it at that for now and cover it in more detail in our rock star section of the course. For now I'm going to add a regular page break. So that chapter two drops down to my new page. And then I'm just going to go through my document and do the exact same thing with each chapter. So when I get to chapter three here, that was a short one, I want you to delete all of those blank lines. And now use from your layout tab, use breaks, either page break or next page break and just be consistent.

You'll notice which one you'll be able to notice which one you've used. When you scroll back up. When you still have that show hide feature turned on it will tell you page break. Or instead if you have use section break next page, it will look like this where you see section break next page it will tell you which break you have placed in the text make sense. Great. This will be super helpful when you're ready to format for final print versions