Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 6, 2024)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365
Many people who come to Word from a WordPerfect environment are curious as to how you can suppress headers and footers in your document. While WordPerfect makes this very easy, the method used in Word is much more flexible (albeit nowhere near as easy).
Word allows you to create headers and footers for each section of your document. (This is a critical point to keep in mind, so it bears repeating: Word ties headers and footers to sections and allows you to modify the header or footer on a section-by-section basis.) Thus, if you have eight sections in your document, each section can have its own header and footer. By default, headers and footers for any new sections are the same as the section just before it. If you want to suppress the existing header or footer in a particular section of your document, follow these steps:
Figure 1. Modifying the linkage of the header or footer.
Now, if you preview your document or print it out, you can see there are headers or footers in each section except the one where you deleted them.
The foregoing steps work fine if you want to suppress a header or footer on a page other than the first page of a section. (Remember—headers and footers are tied to sections and can vary for each section in a document.) If you want to only suppress headers or footers on the first page of each section in your document—perhaps you have one section for each chapter in a book-length document and you want to suppress the header or footer on the first page of each chapter—then follow these steps:
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9383) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Suppressing Headers or Footers.
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