I get so many inquiries regarding headers and footers! People complain that they have a mind of their own and change without their telling them to.
Well the good news is that Word does NOT have gremlins that ship along with it who come out and wreak havoc with your documents!
Word is actually pretty good about doing what you tell it to do. Having said that, the problem is that most of the folks who write to me with these queries do not realize what they are telling Word to do. So hopefully, we will clear up any misconceptions with this article.
If you have a document with sections and assuming every section of your document uses Same As Previous for your footers, which is the default, it means that if you make a change to one of your footers, it will affect ALL of your footers.
So, if you go to the last section of your document and decide you want the numbering to be different and change it, all of your footers are going to have the same type of numbering. A lot of folks become very frustrated by this.
It is really a very simple change that can prevent this frustration. You need to disassociate the footer in one section from those in other sections by turning off the Same As Previous setting.
If you want one section of your document to have a different footer, follow the steps below to learn how?
- Display the footer area in the section you want to change.
- Click on the Same As Previous button on the Headers and Footers toolbar (which will deselect it).
- You can now make your changes and they will be limited to only that section in your document.
Told you it was pretty simple, didn’t I?