Word 2003 from Header to Footer

• By Laurie Rowell
• Nov 5, 2004

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Easy Microsoft Office Word 2003

One nice thing about working in Word is that you can snap headers and footers into place quickly to make even a slapped-together job look polished and professional. If a surprise task lands on your desk, catching you without a prepared template, you need only put appropriate information in headers and footers, strike an appropriate rule below the one and above the other, and you can hand your client a document that really looks like you know your onions.

In the same way that a tidy bed makes a room look cleaner or an edged lawn makes a yard seem neat, the header and footer create the professional trim that makes your work look finished.

Making Headers and Footers Disappear

Before you put anything into a header or footer, you first need to see the header or footer. If you're used to earlier versions of Word, you might think that switching from Normal viewing mode by clicking View, Print Layout ought to reveal the headers and footers. The truth is that sometimes this trick will work, and sometimes it won't. This is because Word 2002 and 2003 come with a new feature that allows you to hide the headers and footers and the white space between pages when in Print Layout view. If this feature is turned on, you won't be able to see your headers and footers. While this setting is convenient if you intend to hide the headers and footers, it's rather a pain in the page positioning if you come upon it by accident, don't know how you made your headers disappear, and can't figure out where they went.

Once you know that the feature is there, however, you can toggle it on and off by clicking either the blank space between your document pages (if headers and footers are showing) or the horizontal line between them (if headers and footers have been removed). Mousing over either the space or the line will cause an indicator to appear, with an appropriate instruction as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Because it's easy to click this toggle inadvertently, some writers (not anyone we know, of course) have been known to become grumpy because suddenly headers and footers evaporated, without any explanation of where they went or why.