Quickly Formatting Footers in Documents with Many Sections

Jake 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:

1. Press Ctrl+Home to go to the beginning of your document.
2. Display the Insert tab of the ribbon.
3. In the Header & Footer group, click either Header or Footer, depending on which one you want to change. Word displays a drop-down list of options.
4. Click Edit Header or Edit Footer, depending on which tool you clicked in step 3. Word displays the header or footer along with the Design tab of the ribbon.
5. Click the Next tool. Word displays the header or footer for the second section of the document.
6. Make changes to the header or footer so it looks like you want it to look.
7. Click the Next tool. This displays the header for the next (third) section of the document.
8. Click the Link to Previous tool. You'll see a dialog box asking if you want to delete this header and link to the previous section. Click Yes.
9. Repeat steps 7 and 8 until you work through all the headers in the document.
10. On the Design tab of the ribbon click on Close Header and Footer.

If you have quite a few headers in your document, these steps can take a while to perform. You'll also need to perform them for all the footers in the document. (The only caveat is that you must switch to display the footers either before or after step 3.) If you have to routinely do this with many documents, then the process becomes even more tedious.

The solution for the tedium is to create a macro that will do the necessary changes for you. Consider the following macro:

Sub MakeSame()
    Dim J As Integer
    Dim K As Integer

    If ActiveDocument.Sections.Count > 2 Then
        For J = 3 To ActiveDocument.Sections.Count
            For K = 1 To ActiveDocument.Sections(J).Headers.Count
                ActiveDocument.Sections(J).Headers(K).LinkToPrevious = True
            Next K
            For K = 1 To ActiveDocument.Sections(J).Footers.Count
                ActiveDocument.Sections(J).Footers(K).LinkToPrevious = True
            Next K
        Next J
    End If
End Sub

The macro checks to see if there are at least three sections in the document. If there are, then it begins to make changes starting with the third section. It steps through all the headers and footers for each section, making sure that they are set to be the same as the previous section.

Once you are done running this macro, just edit the header or footer for the second section and make sure it is set the way you want.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (7541) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Quickly Formatting Footers in Documents with Many Sections.