Headers and Footers

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Headers and Footers' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Changing Headers and Footers
Headers and footers, properly implemented, can add a finishing touch to your documents. Once in place, you can edit both headers and footers at will, to get just the look you need. This tip explains how to make those edits.

Copying Headers and Footers
Need to copy headers or footers from one document to another? This tip walks you though the steps you must follow to accomplish this common task.

Creating Page Footers and Headers
Headers and footers allow you to place repeating information at the top and bottom of each printed document page. This tip explains how easy it is to create headers and footers for your documents.

Deleting a Header or Footer
When working with existing documents, you may need to delete a header or footer previously created. Here's how you can do it in the easiest manner.

Deleting All Headers and Footers
Headers and footers add a finishing touch to documents, but sometimes they can be bothersome. You may need to remove them all from a document, and the easiest way is with a macro that does the work for you.

Different AutoText Entries in Header and Footer
With lots of AutoText entries defined in your system, you may wonder why you can't see all of the ones you need when creating a header or footer. The reason is rooted in how Word handles "styled" AutoText entries, as described in this tip.

Editing Headers and Footers
Headers and footers are a nice final touch in a document. You can easily edit them by using the methods described in this tip.

Floating Footer
Can the Footer be moved to another part of the Word document?

Form Fields in Headers and Footers
Word doesn't allow you to add form fields to headers or footers. The best way to deal with this limitation is to place the form field in your main document, and then reference it in the header or footer using the REF field.

Headers and Footers in Subdocuments
If you use master and subdocuments, you may wonder how to control headers and footers in the subdocuments.

Including a Printer's Name in a Footer
Many people like to customize their printouts to include specialized information in the footer. It is not uncommon to see dates, page numbers, and file locations in the footer. One item you may want to include is which printer the document was printed on. If you know how to grab the information from Word, then including it in the footer is a snap.

Including Headers and Footers when Selecting All
If you are creating a macro that, in the course of processing your document, needs to update all the fields in the document, you may be surprised to find out the process is more complex than anticipated. This tip explains why this is the case, and provides some code you can use to do the updating you need.

Insert AutoText Tool Unavailable on Header and Footer Toolbar
When creating headers or footers, you might notice at some time that the "Insert AutoText" tool on the Header and Footer toolbar is not available. This can be bothersome if you really want to add an AutoText entry to your header or footer. Here's why this happens.

Inserting a Cross-Reference to the First Style on a Page
If you want to create "dictionary style" headings in a document, it's a snap to do if you know how. Just format the document with styles and use the STYLEREF field in your header. Word takes care of automatically changing the header every time the referenced style changes.

Inserting a Cross-Reference to the Last Style on a Page
You can use field codes to return the last text on a page that is formatted with a particular style. This is very handy in putting together headers or footers for reference documents. This tip explains how to correctly use the STYLEREF field to achieve the desired results.

Inserting the Date in a Header or Footer
Adding the date to your header or footer can easily be done with this tip.

Making Wider Footer Margins
Want the margins used in your footers (or headers) to be wider than the margins used in the rest of your document? There are a couple of tricks you can use to get the desired width.

Odd & Even Headers and Footers
Word allows you to define headers and footers for each section of your document. You can, if desired, also define different headers and footers based on whether the page on which they appear is odd- or even-numbered. This tip walks you though how to set up this type of header and footer.

Paragraph Numbers in Headers or Footers
The STYLEREF field is normally used to reference the text of the first or last paragraph on a page that is styled in a particular manner. You can also use the field to reference just the number of the paragraph, if it is numbered. This tip also presents a way to reference the numbers of manually numbered paragraphs.

Positioning Headers and Footers
The position of headers and footers within a section are specified relative to the top or bottom edge of the page. This tip explains how easy it is to make that specification so that you can have your headers and footers positioned exactly where you want them.

Protecting Headers and Footers
If you don't want the information in a header of footer to be changed by users of your document, there are a couple of things you can try. This tip discusses one approach, using the protection features of Word itself.

Pulling Headers and Footers from Other Files
You may have some standard headers and footers you want to make available in your document templates. This tip describes some ways you can approach managing these headers and footers.

Putting Document Names in Headers or Footers
One of the fields provided by Word is FileName, which returns the name of the document file for the current document. Inserting the file name in the header or footer of a document is a common task; this tip explains how it is done.

Quickly Formatting Footers in Documents with Many Sections
If you have a document that includes many, many sections, you may want to change each section so that its headers and footers are the same as the section before it. This tip explains how to do the conversion manually, as well as with a very quick little macro.

Repeating the First Column of a Table
Excel lets you easily repeat a column or two at the left side of a table. Word won't let you do that. Instead, you must use a workaround that involves the placement of a text box that is anchored to your header.

Suppressing Headers or Footers
Do you need to suppress headers or footers in one part of your document or another? Word allows you to control the display of headers and footers on a section-by-section basis, as described in this tip.

Using Continued Lines
If you combine a couple of conditional fields with the regular footer capabilities of Word, you can create some rather unique continuation lines in your document. This tip explains exactly how you can do that.

Using Last-page Headers and Footers
Want to change exactly what is displayed in a header or footer based on the page it appears upon? This tip explains a nifty way to make headers and footers automatically change for the last page of the document.