Conditional Headers & Footer (Word 97/2000/…)

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Hi,

I don’t know if this is possible (probably not) but I will ask the question anyway. I have a template with following structure:

Section 1 – Cover Page – No header/simple 1 line footer
Section 2 – Change History – No header/copyright footer
Section 3 – TOC – page number, chapter title (i.e. “CONTENTS”) in the header & document properties, compnay name, filename in the footer
Section 4 – User information – page number, actual chapter title (“Introduction”, etc) in the header & document properties, companyname, filename in the footer
Section 5 – Back Cover – NO HEADER & NO FOOTER (i.e. blank headers and footers)

BTW: to complicate maters further the header has a horizontal line after the header content and footer has a horizontal line before the footer content.

I found that my users (who should know better ) either delete the 5th section break or copy information into it. So that there are no headers and footers for the information copied into the last section. They also somehow manage to delete the section break so that headers and footers are blank for section 4.

Now can I somehow put the back cover information into the header and use conditional heading to display/not display the header depending on the section number. That is, if this is the last section of the document then display blank headers/footer otherwise display the standard headers/footers as described above I guess this is not going to be possible but I thought I would pose the question anyway. Perhaps use an IF field (somehow) to check on the current section number and display the appropriate header/footer? store the headers and footer as Autotext entries and use them in an IF statement, i.e. IF “current section is last” then ‘display STANDARDHEADER autotext entry’ otherwise ‘display no header autotext entry”. Sme for the footer.

One of things I do in my template is insert a line with ‘hidden’ font before the last section break to say ‘Do not DELETE or COPY anything after this” & yet they manage to delete the section breaks and add information after it. D’oh.

I guess I am asking more than I should but you guys are so brilliant that I am sure you will come up some wonderful solution.

Thanks

Robie

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In my view, the problem is that users only see the nature of a break (page vs. section) in Normal view. If the user is working in Page Layout/Print Layout view, it just looks like a blank page.

Can you use a “color” solution, like having a bright yellow last page as a signal that it is the back cover? My memory of Word 97 is down to a few brain cells, so I can’t remember whether it had Text Boxes and colored shading (as in Borders and Shading). Using a borderless TextBox and Yellow Shading, I think you could create a massive block of yellow on the last page. Perhaps this would deter people from deleting the section break.

Finally, it is possible to create some pretty fancy conditional headers and footers, but I don’t know whether checking the section number is among the options.

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If your section numbers are always consistent it looks like you can do this. There is a section field that gives you the number of the current section; so you can set up a field like { IF { SECTION } = 5 “Use section 5 autotext” “Use other autotext” }. I tried a quick sample on my machine, and it seems to work. But I don’t know if there’s a way to get the LAST section, if you don’t know what the number is.

Hope this helps,

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