When Headers and Footers Go Awry

After you know how to set up mirror margins and add headers and footers, creating a book is just a few steps away.

Preliminary
--Write separate chapters (Word documents with just your text).
--Be sure to apply heading styles to your text.
--Be sure you have an even number of pages...remember slip sheeting.

Construct a Book
--Open a blank document and set up mirror margins and headers and footers.
--Put in a few blank pages at the beginning of your document for an electronic table of contents,
--Insert a New Page section break for your first chapter and update headers and footers.
--Insert the text from chapter one. See the posting Stringing Documents Together.
--Insert a New Page section break for your second chapter and update headers and footers.
--Insert the text from chapter two.
--Repeat until you have added all of the chapters.
--Insert an electronic index if you added the entries.

If you haven't, you can do it later and insert the index at any time. Just insert a New Page section break and then follow the posted instructions to insert an electronic index.

All of this is very ideal world. If you follow the instruction exactly, all will be right with your world.

Documents aren't created in ideal worlds. You can follow these instruction exactly and end up editing and cause your headers and footers to go awry.

Headers and footers are easy to fix...if you know the trick.
1. Go the last page of your document, and look at the footer and header.
2. If they are correct, scroll up to the next header and footer.
3. When you find a header or footer that is incorrect, look to see if the Same as Previous is turned on.
4. If yes, turn it off and fix the footer or header.
5. If no, look for a section break that you didn't intend to put in.

As you move toward the beginning of your document, you'll come to a place where all of the footers and headers are correct.

If things get too bad, you can start from scratch. Follow the book instructions above to create chapter 1, and then copy and paste the text of chapter 1. Because the text and the header and footer on any given page are on different layers of the document, you can place the text without affecting the header or footer. Repeat the instructions to add each subsequent chapter.

If you never have to look at this post again because all of your books are ideal, you'll still use what you learn here when you begin to deal with templates. The instructions I've been posting are lots of what you need to know to create templates. We are not going to go into templates yet. However, before the end of the year, I'll get to them. They're fun. With the background you'll have by the time we get to them, they won't be intimidating.