Headers, Footers, Page Numbers

I have been so caught up with work and my weekends have been too short so yea...forgive me for leaving such a big gap since my last post.. Now let's get back to more 'work smart' with Office 2007, shall we ;)

This post comes from a question which I received from a user when he was creating his documentation. This was the scenario : his document has a cover page, a table of content, and the document body. He had problems fixing the header and the page numbering.

Let's start on this, what I have done in this document here is to put in all my content, the proper headings, generated the table of content and also inserted the cover page (notice the lovely sunflower there :) ) First step would be to settle the content of your document.

Right now, I have just inserted the header (Insert tab > Header > choose the header which you want), the headers have come out on all 4 pages.

I also want the page number to be shown in the header, so I've set my cursor to the end of the header (after '2009') and since the cursor is within the the header, the contextual tab for Header & Footer Tools > Design tab is shown in the ribbon. Choose the Page Number > Current Position and select the number formatting of your choice.

The header now contains the document name, year and also the page number. Next I would like to set a new section for the 'Introduction' portion onwards. Therefore my cover page and table of contents (toc) will be in Section 1, and Introduction onwards will be in Section 2. Click at the beginning of the heading 'Introduction' and go to the Page Layout tab > Breaks > Sections Breaks (Next Page) to do this, or refer to my previous post. I only want my content ('Introduction' onwards) to have the header and page numbering, that starts from page 1.

Click within the 'Header - Section 1' and in the contextual tab for Header & Footer Tools > Design tab in the Options group, make sure the 'Different First Page' option has been cleared, afterthat navigate to the next section by clicking on 'Next Section'.

We are now in Header - Section 2, perform the same checking, make sure the 'Different First Page' option is cleared as well, and turn of 'Link to Previous' so that Section is independent of Section 1.

Once we have done those two checks, click within the document body of Section 1 (cover page and toc), go to the Insert tab, and in Header, choose 'Remove Header' right at the bottom of the options list. This will remove the header in Section 1.

Move to Section 2, choose Page Number (still in the Insert tab) and click on 'Format Page Numbers'. In the Page Number format window, under 'Page Numbering' select the option to Start at: "1" and voila...

That's all there is to it, of course if you follow the steps accordingly.. ;) These steps apply for footers as well.

What are Section Breaks for

I often get asked this question ; How do we have two different Headers in a single document? Well that is when we utilize 'Section Breaks':

Anytime when you are not sure what a feature in Office does, always take some time and read what hints/tips that have been stated, or for Office 2007, when you mouse-over, there will a descriptive screen tip there for our reference.

OK, you ready to start... let's begin our 'Section Break' journey, it's not too lengthy, just need some paid attention, first, we have our document which is 6 pages long with 'Header 1' specified, and it looks like this :

Right now, I want to place a section break at the bottom of Page 2 (marked by 'x'), in the Page Layout tab, click on Breaks in the Page Setup group, and choose Section Break :

After doing this, notice the circled areas in the screen shot highlighting that there are two sections currently, Section 1 and Section 2 and they are linked, rather Section 2 is 'Linked to previous' or 'Same as previous' :


When the sections are still linked, any changes made to either section will reflect across the document even though we have already inserted a Section Break so that we can have separate page properties within a single document. Here I have changed Section 2 header to 'Header 2' and look what happened :

To enable 'Header 1' and 'Header 2' to coexist in the same word document, simply turn off the 'Link to previous' by clicking on it:

You can actually play around with other page properties like Footer, Page Orientation etc which all follow this same section break concept, I have done an example here :

Try it out, that wasn't so tough right :)