How to Add a Landscape Page to a Portrait Document

One page needed to hold a wide table, and switching it to landscape turned the whole document sideways. Orientation in Word belongs to a section, not to a page. Fencing the page off between two section breaks gives it a section of its own, and the change then lands only there.

Show the formatting marks

Click Home, Show/Hide (the ¶ icon), or press Ctrl + Shift + 8 (Mac: Cmd + 8). Section breaks are invisible otherwise, and the rest of this work depends on seeing where they fall.

Insert a section break before the page

Put the cursor at the very start of the first line that belongs on the landscape page. Click Layout, Breaks, and under Section Breaks choose Next Page. Do not use Page Break at the top of the same menu; a page break moves text to a new page but carries no page setup of its own.

Insert a second section break after it

Click at the start of the text that follows the landscape content and insert another Layout, Breaks, Next Page. The wide material now sits in a section with a boundary on each side.

Set that section to landscape

Click anywhere inside the fenced section, then choose Layout, Orientation, Landscape. Only the pages between the two breaks should rotate.

Confirm the change applied to one section

Open the Page Setup dialog with the small arrow in the corner of the Page Setup group. On the Margins tab, check that Apply to reads This section. If it reads Whole document, change it and click OK. Mac Word shows the same Apply to list at the bottom of Format, Document.

Deleting a section break merges the two sections. A section break stores the setup of the text before it, so removing one makes that text take on the orientation and margins of the section that follows. If a page flips unexpectedly, look for a break that was deleted along with a paragraph.

Headers and footers carry across the new boundary. Each new section starts with Link to Previous turned on, so a header edited on the landscape page also changes the portrait pages. Double-click the header in the landscape section and turn off Link to Previous on the Header & Footer tab before adjusting it.

Sources. Change page orientation to landscape or portrait, Insert a section break.