Unlinking All Headers and Footers

Dennis has a book in a single Word document. Each of the 23 chapters are in separate sections. Dennis wonders if there is a way he can create different headers or footers for each chapter without the necessity of manually unlinking every section.

When you add a new section, Word automatically links the headers and footers of the new section to the previous section. If you have a large document, such as what Dennis has, that means unlinking 22 headers and 22 footers. If you have different headers and footers on even pages, then that's 44 more links that need to be broken (22 headers and 22 footers). If you create a different header and footer for the first page of each section, that's another 44 links that need to be changed. (Dennis said he has 23 chapters, which is 23 sections, but no unlinking is necessary for the first section. That's why links for only 22 sections need to be broken.)

To break all the links, it is a potential grand total of 132 links that need to be undone. As a manual task, that's formidable. It is much better to use a macro to unlink them all. The following macro steps through each section of the document and unlinks the header, footer, even page header, even page footer, first page header, and first page footer.

Sub UnlinkAllHeadersFooters()
    Dim s As Section

    For Each sec In ActiveDocument.Sections
        s.Headers(wdHeaderFooterPrimary).LinkToPrevious = False
        s.Footers(wdHeaderFooterPrimary).LinkToPrevious = False
        s.Headers(wdHeaderFooterEvenPages).LinkToPrevious = False
        s.Footers(wdHeaderFooterEvenPages).LinkToPrevious = False
        s.Headers(wdHeaderFooterFirstPage).LinkToPrevious = False
        s.Footers(wdHeaderFooterFirstPage).LinkToPrevious = False
    Next
End Sub

To use the macro, just open the document you want to affect and then run it. You'll then need to manually go through each header and footer and set them to what you desire. The macro could be expanded to set them, provided you could define a pattern for how you want the header or footer to appear. Such an enhancement, though, is beyond the scope of this simple tip.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13280) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365.