Master Headers and Footers in Microsoft Word (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Headers and footers are one of those word features that seem simple on the surface, but once you dig in, there's a lot more to them than most people realize. I'm Elizabeth, and in this video, I'll show you everything that you need to know. First, a quick definition. A header is the area at the very top of a page, above the main body content, while a footer is the area at the very bottom, below the body content. Both can repeat automatically on every page of your document. You put things there that you want to appear consistently throughout, such as a document title, your company name, a logo, the date, or page numbers. There are two simple ways to open the header or footer area in a Word document. The quickest way is to just double-click in the very top of the page. The header area is now highlighted with a dashed border. You'll notice that the main body of your document has gone gray, meaning that it's temporarily locked while you're editing the header, and a new tab appeared in the ribbon. This is your header and footer tab, and this is the control center for everything we're going to cover in this video. The second way to open headers and footers is directly within your ribbon. You'll select the Insert tab, and then select Header and Footer. Here, you'll see the buttons for Header, Footer, and Page Number. Either of these methods work just fine. To close the header and footer and return to editing the body of your document, you'll just double-click anywhere, or you could select Close Header and Footer. Once you're inside the header, it works just like any other text area in Word. You can change the font, adjust the size, bold, italicize, or change color, whatever you need. You'll also notice that there are tabs preset in the header, one flush on the left, one in the center, and one at the right edge. This is a really handy built-in feature. You'll press Tab once to jump to the center, and again to jump to the far right. A common professional header could include the name of the company on the left-hand side, the document title in the middle, and the date on the far right-hand side. For the footer, similar rules apply. I'll scroll down to the bottom of my page, double-click into my footer. Now, one noticeable change is that the Tab button actually provides you with a handful of more options in terms of text placement. I'll select where I want my text, and there, I'm done. Page numbers are probably the most common thing that people put in headers and footers, so let's cover them fully. The easiest way is to select Page Number in the Header and Footer tab. You'll see that you get a dropdown of locations that you can insert the page number, top of page, bottom of page, page margins, or the current position that your mouse is in. Bottom of the page is the most common choice. You'll see that you receive a gallery of common places and styles that you could place the page number. Some are more simple, others are going to be a bit fancier. Let me go ahead and select one that's bold and going to be in the far right of my footer. The page number inserted automatically, and crucially, it's not just the number one typed in. It's a live field that will update automatically on every page of the document. If you change your mind and want a different style, just go back to Page Number. This time, I'll select a plain number. You'll see that it automatically defaulted to two because I'm on the second page. If I want to change the number format, I can come here to Format Page Numbers, and this time, I'll select Roman numerals. Done. A very common need may be that you want the first page of your document, maybe it's a title page or a cover letter, to have no header or footer at all, while all the other pages do. In order to do that, click on the Options tab, and then select Different First Page. Now, Word has created a separate footer and header for just the first page of my document, and it's completely independent from the rest of the document. You could see that it's removed the page number I had previously, but yet on all of the other pages of my document, the page number remains. I'm going to leave the first page of my presentation blank, which is exactly how you would format a report that starts with a clean title page. But on all of the additional pages, I want to have a very specific header. I'll insert my text, tab to where I want my text, and now this will appear on every page in my document, with the exception of the first page. Another powerful option is to have different odd and even pages. You'll check that box in the same Options group. Now, you have separate headers for odd-numbered pages and even-numbered pages. This is how professionally printed books work. Typically, the book title appears on the left-hand side, and the chapter title appears on the right-hand side. Word will label each of those clearly, in this case, the odd page footer. You'll design each one independently, and Word alternates them automatically throughout the document. A more powerful and slightly trickier feature is having completely different headers and footers in different parts of the same document. This is done by creating sections. If you want a different header starting on a specific page, let's say this one for the introduction, then I'll need to insert a section break before that page. I'll click on the previous page, and then under Layout, select Breaks. Here, you'll select Next Page under Section Breaks. Now, when I click into this header, you'll see that it's titled First Page Header, but it's in Section 2 of my document. You'll also notice a label called Same as Previous, and there's a button in the ribbon with the same name. By default, Word links each section's header to the previous section so they stay the same. To make them independent, which is what we want to do here, click Link to Previous and turn it off. Now, I can type an entirely different header in Section 2, and it won't affect the Section 1 at all. And then I can continue to repeat this throughout my document. And one important note on the unlinking. You'll need to do this for both the header and the footer independently. Unlinking the header doesn't automatically unlink the footer. Headers are not limited to text. You can also insert images, which is how you add a company logo to your letterhead. With your cursor inside of the header, select Insert and then Picture. Once you've selected your image, you can resize it by dragging the corners together. Remember to keep your logo on the smaller side. Headers are narrow, and a logo that's too large will push the body of the content down. Once you have your logo sized appropriately, you can use the Tab key to move it exactly where you want on your letterhead. Now that I have my image, I want to add some text to this document as well. But you'll notice if I move the cursor to the upper left-hand corner, it's not letting me write anything in my header. There's a few ways that you can solve for this. The easiest is to select your image, click on Layout Options, and then select Through. You'll actually see that it brought my image closer to the body of my document, but we can adjust that in a moment. Now that I click back into my header, you'll see that the cursor will actually allow me to write wherever I want. I'm going to go ahead and add the address to my business. And you can make edits to this just like you would in any Word document, adjust the font, the size, the color, et cetera. Once I have that looking the way I want, I can then drag my image back into place, or if I liked it down a bit, I can go ahead and adjust the content of my document. You can add additional things into this as well. For example, I would select Insert, select Shapes, and then click on the line. I can then drag the line exactly where I want it to go within my header, and I can adjust the color as well as the width of the line if I want. And I can, of course, move that around as well to get it looking exactly how I want. One important note, watch your margin settings. Headers and footers sit inside the page margins. If your header content is getting cut off, select Layout, and then select Margins. You could click into Custom Margins, select Layout, and then you could select the distance from the edge of the page for both your header and your footer. And that's everything you need to know about headers and footers in Microsoft Word. Thanks for watching, and don't forget to watch our other Word tutorials on the channel.