Suppressing Headers or Footers

Many people who come to Word from a WordPerfect environment are curious as to how you can suppress headers and footers in your document. While WordPerfect makes this very easy, the method used in Word is much more flexible.

Word allows you to create headers and footers for each section of your document. Thus, if you have eight sections in your document, each section can have its own header and footer. By default, headers and footers for any new sections are the same as the section just before it. If you want to suppress the header or footer in a particular section of your document, follow these steps:

1. Position the insertion point within the section whose header or footer you want to suppress.
2. Choose Header and Footer from the View menu. Word displays the Header and Footer toolbar.
3. Display the header or footer, depending on which one you want to suppress. You control which is displayed on the screen (header or footer) by clicking on the Switch Between Header and Footer tool.
4. Make sure the Same as Previous tool is not selected. (If it is selected, it looks selected—"sunk in.")
5. If you are working in the last section of your document, skip to Step 9.
6. Click your mouse on the Show Next button to display the next section's header or footer.
7. Again, make sure the Same as Previous button is not selected.
8. Click your mouse on the Show Previous button to again display the header or footer for the section for which you want headers or footers suppressed.
9. Delete the header or footer.
10. Click on Close to get rid of the Header and Footer toolbar.

Now, if you preview your document by choosing Print Preview from the File menu, you can see there are headers or footers in each section except the one where you deleted them.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (265) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Suppressing Headers or Footers.