Quickly Formatting Footers in Documents with Many Sections

Source: WordsTips

Summary: 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. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, and Word 2003.)

Jake Rashford has a document that is created automatically by a program other than Word. The document has many pages in it, but each page is created as a separate section. Jake is looking for a way to quickly format the document so that the headers and footers are the same, beginning with the second section of the document. (The first page, which is also its own section, contains a cover sheet.)

You can make the necessary changes manually by following these steps:

Press Ctrl+Home to go to the beginning of your document.

Choose Header and Footer from the View menu so you can see the Header and Footer dialog box. The Header and Footer dialog box should display the header for the first section of your document.

Click the Show Next button. This displays the header for the second section of the document.

Make changes to the header so it looks as you want it to look.

Click the Show Next button. This displays the header for the next (third) section of the document.

Click Link to Previous. You'll see a dialog box asking if you want to delete this header and link to the previous section. Click Yes.

Repeat steps 5 through 6 until you work through all the headers in the document.

Close the Header and Footer dialog box.

This tip also works for changing footers in the document. The only caveat is that you must switch to display the footers either before or after step 3.