Section breaks messing up - with columns

I have ended up completely scrapping columns.

Despite everything said above, and much trial and error, I simply could not get columns working - delimited by section breaks. Trying to make the columns work kept messing up the headers/footers associated with sections.

Simply, if you concentrate on getting the columns working, you can very easily makes changes which affect headers and footers. When you get them working, you can easily find the columns not working.

I ended up creating a table with a few columns. That was trivial. And using sections solely to control headers and footers.

The reason I wanted columns to work was for future maintenance. If I add any entries, or delete existing ones, I have to rejig the table. (Probably convert back to paragraphs, make my changes, sort if necessary, then convert back to a table.

For my current purpose, a dynamic table which snakes would be a neat feature. You add an entry (as a new cell) and the table manager adjusts the number of rows as needed. And flows them over however many columns you have specified. Even better if you could tell it to sort.

The behavior when you delete a section break is not 100% logical. For an overview, see https://wordmvp.com/FAQs/Formatting/WorkWithSections.htm. As the article says, after you have deleted a section break, you will lose those section properties that were stored in the deleted break, and therefore you may have to change the formatting. This often applies not only to the type of section break, but to other properties as well, such as margins and newspaper columns.

I can't really tell from your screen shot exactly which formatting has been lost, if any.

Generally, though, Word will balance a section with multiple newspaper columns if the section ends in a continuous break:

In the example above, the latter section break will balance the columns. (The first section break on the page in the screen shot is also continuous, but it does not contribute to balancing the columns.)

Are you saying that you want the list of brand names to become "balanced" across the newspaper columns? In that case, you have to terminate the columnar section with a continuous section break.

You mentioned Windows. Have you tried an Office repair? Repair an Office application

Thanks for the reply.

No - because it is happening on two entirely separate machines.

And the repair link applies to Windows - not macOS.