header/footer problem (Word 2000)

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When I turn on headers/footers in a Word 2000 document, footers appear only on odd pages although headers appear on both odd and even-numbered pages. I’ve looked everywhere for a toggle or switch to no avail and have consulted several books but haven’t found a clue as to what might be causing the problem or how to solve it. Any help you can offer will be most appreciated.

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The first thing you want to look at is in the Page Setup. Choose File > Page Setup. Then, on the Layout tab, make sure that Different Odd and Even is NOT checked. See what you get after changing that setting.

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Mary. Thanks much. Your suggestion give me a partial fix. I now have footers on all pages. But I neglected to say earlier that I want headers on odd pages different than headers on even pages. Do I have to change these one page at a time or is there some way to automate the process? When I unchecked Different Odd and Even I solved the footer problem but now the headers are identical.

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That is a completely different animal. What you must do if you want different on each page is turn that option back on. Then, put a header/footer on the first page and then put what you want on the second page. This will set what each odd and even page gets. Do you have any sections that are to be different?

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Well, I’m now back to the point of beginning. I’ve got different headers on odd and even pages — as desired. But while I have a footer on the odd pages, none appears on the even pages. I first thought the problem might be originating in my combination of Section Start and Apply To options but I think I’ve tried all the possibilities and still don’t have a footer on the even pages. Any further thoughts? Thanks for your time and help.

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Position the insertion point in an even page.
Select View | Header and Footer
Switch to the footer using the button on the Header and footer toolbar.
Do you end up in an empty “frame” titled something like “Footer (Even Page)”?
If so, type something, then close Header/Footer view. You should see footers on even pages too now.
If not, try navigating to previous or next footers using the buttons on the Header/footer toolbar. Do you ever see something like “Footer (Even Page)”?

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Hans, thanks for the response. My problem is that while the Odd Page Footer outline box shows up on odd pages, no footer box appears on even pages when I’ve got the “Different add and even” check box clicked. When I unclick the box, I get both Header and Footer boxes on all pages, but them I’m faced with having the same header content on all pages. Why the darn Even Page Footer box won’t appear is beyond me. Anything you can suggest wil be most welcome. Thanks again.

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I can think of two more things to try:

Copy everything except the last paragraph mark to a new document:

• Select the entire document (Ctrl+A)
• Exclude the last paragraph mark (Shift+left arrow)
• Copy to the clipboard (Ctrl+C)
• Create a new document (Ctrl+N)
• Paste the text from the clipboard (Ctrl+V)
• Set the page setup, and then the headers and footers the way you want them.
  [/list]By omitting the last paragraph mark, the strange problem with the even page footer will not have migrated to the new document.

  or:

  Post a stripped down version of the document.

  • Make a copy of the document.
  • Remove almost everything; leave only two pages with some dummy text. This should be enough to demonstrate the problem.
  • Take care not to leave sensitive information in the copy (check out File | Properties).
  • Save the copy.
  • Attach the copy to a post. It should be below 100 KB, but since oyu have removed most of the contents, that shouldn’t be a problem.
    [/list]I’m sure Loungers will take the trouble to look at it.

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I followed your step-by-step instructions [to the letter, I believe] and the problem appeared to be solved — until I checked the “Different odd and even” box in order to have the content of the headers aligned as shown in the attached document [a few pages of the original that appear to contain the problem]. At that point, the headers [which previously had all be aligned flush right [as specified for odd pages] reconfigured as shown [even headers flush left; right headers flush right]. Concurrently, the left hand page footer boxes disappeared.

Anything you can suggest would be most appreciated. My thanks.

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Hmm… I pasted the text into a new document and set the page layout. I still have odd and even footers.
See attached document.

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I haven’t figured out what caused it. I copied your document (including the last paragraph mark into a new document & changed the page setup to the way you had it. Then I added Odd/Even header/footers & they worked. See attached.

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My thanks to everyone. I’ve not yet pinpointed the problem source — but I will and let all of you know what I find. Thanks for all the help.

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My guess is that there is some kind of weird corruption in the page setup of your document; I doubt whether you’ll find out what caused it. But if you do find something, post it – perhaps somebody else will profit from it one day.

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I’ve checked the Page Setup settings in the document and they’re consistent with those that show up when I activate View>Header/Footer and found no inconsistencies. So I tried a different approach. I created a new document and set up headers and footers, which appeared as anticipated. Then, I copied the the content of the original document and pasted it into the new one. The fix worked. The headers and footers that I’d created before placing the content remained.

I’ve not a clue, unfortunately, as to the source of the problem. I’ve a little plug-in in Word called Cross-Eyes that permits me to examine the hidden commands in Word in much the same way that I was able to do years ago with WordPerfect’s “Reveal” command. I looked at the code in both the problem document and the “fixed” copy but could detect no differences. So the mystery remains, but the fix hopefully may be helpful to others.

Again, my thanks to all who responded.

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That is an odd corruption. I haven’t seen that before.

I tried saving the file out as RTF and then reopening it. This fixed the rogue missing footer too so that is another way to fix the problem.

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I have seen similar things happen in some of our documents. Either a header or a footer will be missing. This is generally a problem with documents converted from Word Perfect to Word. The way it was explained to me (and I’m not an authority as I’ve never used Word Perfect) is that headers and footers are optional in Word Perfect. If a Word Perfect document which did not use a header or footer is opened in Word, that header or footer may be missing in the Word document. I would fix it by stripping all the section breaks from the Word document, then saving and closing it. I would then open a new document, go to File/Insert, find the original Word document and insert it into the newly opened document. That should strip ALL section formatting from the document. You’d have to recreate the header and footer information, but you should at least be working on a clean canvas.

By the way, I would assume that this could also happen if you pasted formatted text from a Word Perfect document to a Word document, if the pasted text carried the header/footer codes in it. I’ve never tested that, but it’s a reasonably educated guess.

Lee Morgan

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