How can I put my annotations in one column, but the rest of the text in two columns?

Dear Hanne

Thank you for reaching out to the Q&A Forum!

Is this the layout you’re aiming for in your reference and annotation section (as shown in the image below)? If so, please note that this can only be done in the Word desktop app, not Word Online.

Here’s what you can do:

First, select all your text and go to Layout > Columns > Two to convert the main text into two columns. Then, apply Justify alignment by selecting the entire text and choosing Home > Paragraph > Justify.

For your references, select that section and set it to one column by going to Layout > Columns > One.

Finally, for the two-column annotations, place your cursor at the end of the paragraph and choose Layout > Breaks > Continuous.

If you’re using Word Online, this feature isn’t available. A workaround is to create a table with two columns for your main text and manually copy your content into the cells. For references, you can insert a single-cell row.

Please give these steps a try and let me know how it goes. If not, feel free to ask, I'm happy to help.

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I am not sure about Word for Mac, but Word for Windows definitely lets you arrange the footnotes in a single column layout even if the body of the document uses two or more newspaper columns.