Computer Interface
The aim of this article is to help the readers work
effectively by using automated tools built into the application software. This
article would be useful for beginners as well as intermediate level users.
Most of us have a tendency to underutilise the resources
built into the older versions also. Come to think of it, most of us use the PC
more like a typewriter thus leaving the computing power utterly untapped. I have
commented on this far too many times in this column and it is for this reason I
chose to write an article on a difficult aspect like headers and footers.
I’m often surprised to find that certain Word users are
completely unaware of the headers and footers feature in Word. In part, this is
because Word’s designers hid it. Word has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, and the
Insert menu is home to most of them. Some of the useful things that Word has to
offer can be found on the Insert menu: page numbers, date and time, AutoText,
fields, symbols, comments, footnotes and endnotes, cross-references, indexes and
tables, text boxes, pictures, frames, diagrams. However, Header and Footer
is hidden on the View menu. Users who come straight from a typewriter to Word
don’t think of using headers and footers, because they’re used to manually
typing text at the beginning or end of a page. It may not occur to them that
there is a better way. But the header/footer feature in Word is one of its most
useful tools, one that users need to learn how to take advantage of.
Headers and footers in a document :
Headers and footers are areas in the top and bottom margins
(margin : The blank space outside the printing area on a page.) of each page in
a document.
You can insert text or graphics in headers and footers — for
example, page numbers, the date, a company logo, the document’s title or file
name, or the author’s name — that are printed at the top or bottom of each page
in a document.
The question one would ask is when should I use a header
or footer ?
Headers and footers are used in the following instances :
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Repeated text
Whenever you need to repeat text or graphics on a page.
Usually such text will be a ‘running head’ or ‘running foot’ at the top or
bottom of the page, but header and footer content is not confined to the top and
bottom; it can appear anywhere on the page — in the same place on every page
(but some content can be dynamic; for example, a page number can change on every
page).
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Text that stays put
Whenever you need to put text at the beginning or at the end
of a document that will stay put and be out of the way.
Repeated text :
One of the most common elements of a header or footer is a
page number. You may already have figured out how to number pages using the
Insert | Page Numbers command. For simple documents, this feature actually
offers a great deal of power and flexibility : you can omit the page number on
the first page, you can choose where you want it to appear (top or bottom, left,
centre, or right — even inside or outside for facing pages), and you can choose
from a variety of number formats. You can choose to include a chapter number (see
picture 2), and you can choose a starting page number. With care, you can
even use this feature in documents with more than one section. If you know what
you’re doing, you can edit the page field that Word inserts for you, to add text
such as “Page” before the number.
Usually, though, in anything but the simplest type of
document, page numbers inserted this way become difficult to use (especially if
you want to combine them with other text). Moreover, if you decide not to use
them, there is no way to “turn them off” from the Page Numbers dialog, and if
you remove them incompletely (failing to delete the frame the page number is
in), you can have puzzling problems down the line (see “Text at the top of the
page is unaccountably indented”). In any situation where you need more than a
simple page number (even something as simple as “Page 1 of n”), you should use a
header or footer (see picture 3). This includes book and chapter titles
(or the name of the author) in books, section titles in reports, logos and
letterheads in letters, watermarks, and so on.
Text that stays put :
The most common example of text that belongs in a header is a
letterhead. You want to put that at the beginning of a letter, and you want it
to be out of the way of other text you will add, so that it doesn’t get pushed
down the page. Usually you don’t want it repeated on every page, so you use a
special kind of header for it. Another example is the text you want to stay at
the end of a document, no matter how much text you add to the document. You can
put that in a footer. Again, you don’t want it repeated on every page, but there
is a way to achieve that too, as will be detailed below.
Creating a header or footer :
As mentioned above, even if you think your document doesn’t
yet have a header or footer, you have to use View | Header and Footer to create
one. This may seem illogical to you, but in fact, the header and footer already
exist; they’re just empty until you put something in them.
Unlike Word Perfect, where the header and footer are at the top and bottom margins, and you have to add space between them and the document text, Word reserves space for the header and footer outside the top and bottom margins (as shown in picture 1) They have their own distinct margins, which you set from the Margins tab of File I Page Setup in Word 2000 and earlier and on the Layout tab of Word 2002 and above. In order to insert headers and footers click on Header and Footer on the View menu.
Once you have created a header or footer, you can open it for editing in Print Layout view by double-clicking on the existing content. To open it the first time, however (or to access it from Normal view), you must select View I Header and Footer. When you do this, Word opens the header pane and displays the Header and Footer toolbar (see picture 4). This toolbar offers a number of useful buttons that will be discussed throughout this article. The first one you should find is the Switch Between Header and Footer button. If you are trying to create a footer rather than a header, this is what you need to get to the footer pane.
(The concluding portion of this write up will be published in the next issue of the BCAJ)
