Office 2007 Bible

The Header and Footer Layer

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 full-bleed 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 ...