Like that crazy aunt and uncle who live in Montana—or was it Idaho—headers and footers are often misunderstood.

Most folks think they know what they do and where they live, but they don’t fully understand them. The next sections will remove the veil and give you the full truth about headers and footers in a way that not only puts you fully in the driver’s seat, but helps you understand when something unexpected suddenly shows up.

Seemingly, headers and footers are the areas in the top and bottom margins of each page, but that’s not the whole story. In Word, headers and footers are distinct layers in your document, usually behind the text area.

They usually appear at the top or bottom of the page, respectively, but that’s just a convention. Once you’re in Word’s header or footer layer, text and graphics can be placed anywhere on the page.

This means that in addition to titles, page numbers, dates, and other essential bits of information, headers and footers are also ripe for containing things such as watermarks, side margin material, or even those fullbleed markers that are visible when you look at the edge of the pages of a closed book. (the concept is there, the actual implementation requires a type of printer most of us can’t afford and don’t need).

A second area of misunderstanding concerns how headers and footers are inserted into your Word documents. They aren’t inserted. They’ve been there right from the start. When you “insert” or “create” a header, you’re really doing neither. Instead, you’re merely using what was already there, but was previously empty or unused.

When you’re working in Print Layout view, any text in the header and footer layer usually shows up as grayish text at the top, bottom, or side of your document. To access those areas, double-click where you want to edit—even if you don’t see any text there. This brings the header and footer areas to the surface, as shown in Figure 8-14.

Headers and footers also display in Print Preview. There, however, because the view is supposed to represent what you’ll see when the document is printed, the header/footer areas aren’t gray and isolated. By default, headers and footers don’t show up in Full Screen Reading view unless you use the Show Printed Page option. Unlike normal document text, however, headers and footers cannot be edited or changed in Full Screen Reading view. For that honor and privilege, you need to be in Print Layout view or Print Preview.

This chapter assumes that you are working in Print Layout view. If you don’t see what’s shown in the screen shots, then check your view setting.

Document sections
Figure 8-14 indicates the document section number in the header and footer tabs at the left end of each area. Word documents can be single-section or multi-section. You might use multiple sections for a variety of reasons, particularly in long documents. Some users place each chapter of a document in a separate section, with additional sections being used for front matter (tables of contents, tables of figures, forward, etc.) and back matter (index, glossary, etc.).

Section formatting allows for different sections to have different kinds of numbering. It also allows different header and footer text in different sections. For example, the header or footer might include the name of
each chapter, or the word Index or Glossary.

Section formatting is also used for other reasons that have nothing in particular to do with headers and footers. See the earlier sections in this chapter for more uses for section formatting.

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