Insert A Header In Microsoft Word
Inserting a header in Word 2010 is very much like inserting a footer, so we shall cover both in this tutorial. When we look at inserting footers, we’ll also discover how to add page numbers to each page, too.
Insert A Header
To insert a header in your Word document, click Insert > Header & Footer > Header.
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In the panel that opens, you can see a gallery of built in headers that you can choose. The different headers available give different layouts for the text and other elements you need to display in the header. You can also insert a blank header and format it yourself manually. We’ll use a blank header for our example.
The blank header should appear at the top of the list, so click on that to insert it. A header will appear with a default text box that you can start typing in. You will also see the Header & Footer Tools tab appear in the ribbon.
In our example, we’re going to display the document name in the header, so type “Document: ” in the box. We’re not going to type out the document name ourselves. Instead, we’ll let Word do that by inserting a field. On the Header & Footer Tools tab, click Insert > Quick Parts > Field, and then select FileName and click OK. Leaving the Format selection as none ensures that the capitalisation used in the document name is used here.
By default, the text and field that we’ve just added will be left aligned. Suppose we need to align them to the right of the document. In that case, position the cursor at the start of the text and, still on the Header & Footer Tools tab, click Position > Insert Alignment Tab.
Select the Right option and then click OK. Everything should now be right aligned. Also on the Alignment Tab window, you can see options for left aligning and centering.
When you’ve finished making changes to the header, you can close the header area by either clicking on the Close Header and Footer button to the right of the ribbon, or by double clicking anywhere in the document itself. Similarly, to open up the header area again, you can double click on the header.
Insert A Footer
We follow a similar process when we insert a footer in our Word document: click Insert > Header & Footer > Footer. Again, a gallery of footer designs is presented and we can click on one to insert it. We’ll select the blank one at the top of the list and format it ourselves. One of the things we’ll add is a page number to each page.
To add the page number to the footer, click Insert > Text > Quick Parts > Field, and in the field list on the left select Page. Click OK.
Adding Page Numbers To Word
If all you want is to add page numbers to your footer, then you should read our tutorial on how to add page numbers to Word (coming soon).