The MLA style requires that works cited be listed in alphabetical order by author’s last name. With Word, you can arrange paragraphs in alphabetic, numeric, or date order based on the first character of each paragraph. Ordering characters in this manner is called sorting. Obviously, the situations in which this is handy are limited.

However, for works cited, assuming that the entry starts with what the list should be sorted by, this can be very handy. First, select all paragraphs to be sorted. Then Click Table on the Menu bar and then point and click on Sort.

In the dialog box that is displayed, you can choose sort ascending or descending. You can also choose to sort by paragraphs or fields, and whether to sort based on text sort, number sort, or date sort.

Word documents can be divided into any number of sections (1 or more). Each section can have its own settings for such things as margins, page alignment, page orientation, page number position, contents or position of headers or footers or footnotes. If you want some part of a document to have different settings for one of these than in other parts of the document, then you need to create a new section.

When creating a section, you place a “section break” in the document, just as you could insert a hard page break in a document. Do Insert>Break, then in the dialog box, choose section break type: Next page to start section on the next page, or Continuous to start on the same page.

Word stores all section formatting in the section break. Deleting the section break will delete the formatting as well.

To format a document so that part of it is in multiple columns, that part needs to be made into a section. So first, insert a continuous section break as described above. Next, making sure that the mouse cursor is in the correct section, find the columns button on the standard toolbar. Likely, you will have to go hunting for it because it probably will not have been used recently. Then choose the number of columns (1-4). When you create columns using the columns button, the columns are equal width. You can create columns of unequal width by clicking on the Columns command on the Format menu.

When working with a lot of columns on a page, full justification may be used to make things neater than the would be with many ragged edge columns. The risk is a lot of extra blank space that may make the article hard to read.

When using multiple columns, you can insert a hard column break just like you normally insert a hard page break. A column break forces following text to be in a new column. Choose Insert> Break, then choose Column Break in the dialog box.