Avoiding a Section Break Booby Trap

There's a "booby trap" when using section breaks that you may not be aware of. If you make a section break to create special page formatting and afterwards (for whatever reason) want to remove the section break, you could mess up the formatting of your document.

For instance, let's say you add a section break to your document, and format the portion before the section break different from that after. Thus, your document formatting can be described as follows:

Text with "normal" page layout
==== Section break ====
Text with special page layout

When you delete the section break, the whole document inherits the latter page layout. This is very seldom the result you wanted, since you probably wanted to get rid of the special page layout, not the normal page layout.

One way around this potential problem is to always add a pair of section breaks and then edit the page layout of the middle section:

Text with "normal" page layout
==== 1st section break ====
Text with special page layout
==== 2nd section break ====
Text with "normal" page layout

In this case, when you remove both section breaks you'll end up with the last page layout (which is "normal").