Headers and Footers in Main Body with Table Breaks

N

NewUser_Sanket

Hello All,

I am a new to VBA or programming, but felt this was the right group to post
my question on. I want to do this one task in MS Word and felt that VBA would
the best to go along with it. Correct me if I am wrong in any of the above
statements. I am using Word 2003.

Task: I have a multipage document in .rtf format. This document has table
in it which occupies more than a page. All pages will have header and footer.
I want to remove this header and footer and put the text in them in the main
document one every page- at the top of each page for the header and bottom of
each page for footer. If there is a table spanning more than a page, then I
need to break the table at the appropriate point (which should depend upon
the size of the header and the footer) and continue the table on the next
page after the header on page -2.

Trying to put things in a simpler way: Lets say I have a document with 3
pages. The document has header and footer on every page. The content of the
document is a long table spanning all 3 pages.
Eg: Header(page1) > Page1 Table > Footer
Header(page2) > Page2 Table > Footer
Header(page3) > Page3 Table > Footer.

I want to convert this to :
No Header > Text(from header) - Table - Text(from footer) > No Footer in
Page1
No Header > Text(from header) - Table - Text(from footer) > No Footer in
Page2
No Header > Text(from header) - Table - Text(from footer) > No Footer in
Page3
and the same in page 4 if the table happens to go to it.

I recorded some related macros and looked at the VB code generated, but it
was way outside my box to understand what was going on.
Any help would be appreciated.

Best Regards,
Sanket
 
N

NewUser_Sanket

Hi Again,

I forgot to mention that I tried to post the same question to the Tables and
NewUser groups - but luckily have not been successful. I was reading the
posting ethics and tips and found I should nto be positng to other groups.

Thanks in advance.
 
T

Tony Jollans

At a simple level, it can't be done, although a contrived solution could
probably be found. What is the purpose of this?
 
C

Charles Kenyon

What you are trying to do is very difficult. It runs counter to the way Word
is designed to work.

Headers and footers are intended to be multi-page creations, often
reflecting information that shows up in pages using the StyleRef field.

Word doesn't really understand or use pages, as such. They are print-time
constructs.

If you can tell us why you are doing this, I suspect someone can tell you
how to accomplish what you want using Word's features rather than fighting
them.

By the way, you'll probably want to try posting in the vba.beginners
newsgroup instead, since it is a vba question.

Final comment, learn how Word works before you try to program it. Otherwise
you will either spend a lot of time writing code to do something that Word
already does very well or you'll end up fighting with Word, having it seem
to undo what you are attempting. While this learning process may take a bit
of time, within in relatively short time, you'll be saving hours, days, or
even weeks of effort.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide


--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---------
This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.
 
N

NewUser_Sanket

Hello Tony, Charles and others,

Both of you have asked me the purpose of my task. I work with SAS
programming language and SAS creates reports in RTF format. Now these reports
are individual tables which are on average 3-4 pages long. With SAS, we put
the title of the table in the header part of the RTF and some footnotes in
the footer part.

Lets say in an average there are 100 such reports. In the end we haave to
join all of them and still retain the Table titles and footnotes (as per
table) on each relevant page. Also, the final document will have a different
header and footer. Now because there are different headers and fo oters from
these 100 diferent reports, it is a pian with merging them into one.

The task I want to accomplish is for the header from the document to be a
part of the main document in each report and likewise with the footers. The
table has to break itself accordingly and get the header into the document
and the footer below it in every page and the header and footer should be
deleted. This way when the document is merged with others, the final
document will retain the table names and footnotes for each table, while at
the same time can have a common header and footer throughout.

I hope I have been clear.

Best regards,
Sanket
 
T

Tony Jollans

Hi Sanket,

Basically what you want can't be done the way you suggest - and it means you
pre-empting Word's pagination and hoping that you get it right. What you
seem to want is some kind of report generation tool with multiple levels of
header and footer - unfortunately Word doesn't do this.

Before offering you a way of doing it might I suggest an alternative avenue
for investigation. I can't be precise without seeing exactly what you're
working with but consider putting each table in a separate section. Each
section can have its own headers and footers. The awkward bit here might be
adding your common headers and footers to the beginning and end respectively
of every section header and footer - but the end result ought to be what you
want.

Also before going any further - are your footers footers or footnotes - the
two are different and footnotes will print at the bottom of the page before
the page footer all by themselves.

Now for the promised way of putting non-table content in the middle of a
table without breaking the table into multiple smaller tables:

Insert a textbox in the first cell on the first row on the page.
In the Textbox Format Dialog, select the Colours and Lines tab and
Set the Line Colour to "No Line"
In the Textbox Format Dialog, select the Layout tab and click on Advanced
In the Text Wrapping tab, select "Top and Bottom" wrapping
In the Picture Position tab ...
Uncheck "Layout in Table Cell"
Set the Horizontal Absolute Position to, probably, zero to the right of
the cell
Set the Vertical Absolute Position to zero or a negative number
Size your textbox to fit your header
Enter your header content in the textbox
Pray.

Do someting similar for the footer
Pray again.

Repeat for every page.

There are variations on this theme that you can try. What you will find the
most awkward (especially programmatically) will be determining exactly which
rows will fall either side of the page breaks.

Good luck!
 
S

Sanket

Hi Tony,

I might not have been very clear in my previous post. The purpose of merging
different documents with multiple headers and footers is not my goal.

I am working with only one document at a time. When saying this I mean that
the document has only one header, one footer and one table.
My task is
I will need to create a macro for this. So will have to code it in VBA, I
guess.

If it is not possible to do it, I might as well not attempt it. But somehow
I feel that my task is not going against the word pagination but just about
cut-paste text from header and footer and about table breaks and page breaks
at right locations.
To do it programmatically is still a monumental task for me.

Please advice.

Best regards,
Sanket
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

I think it would help if we understood why you need to do this. Is this in
order to convert the document to .txt or .htm format (in which headers and
footers are not retained)?
 
D

Daiya Mitchell

Hi Sanket,
If it is not possible to do it, I might as well not attempt it. But somehow
I feel that my task is not going against the word pagination but just about
cut-paste text from header and footer and about table breaks and page breaks
at right locations.
Click to expand...

The problem is, the right location is likely to change every time you switch
printers, especially if a table ever gets edited. Page breaks in Word do not
stay in place.

Rather, you might try messing with your SAS program that generates the files
to see if it can export the text differently.

For instance, if the title of the table were exported as the first row of
the table (instead of as a header), you might then be able to set that first
row as a heading row to repeat on every page in Word, which should serve the
purpose of showing the table title on every page.

It's unclear to me whether the stuff at the bottom is footers or footnotes.
Table footnotes should not be in a footer at all, but are usually at the
bottom of the table. If the table footnotes are acting like a map legend,
and need to be on every page, maybe try exporting them along with the title
into the first row.

Then you would just be able to merge the text documents programmatically.
 
S

Sanket

HI,

Its not to convert it into .htm or .txt format but for some later processing
which cannot have any headers and footers in it. The information in the
headers and footers for the document has to be retained though. So, thereby,
I need to get the text out from the headers and footers and put it in the
main part of the document - Header above the table and footer below the table
on each page of the document.

Thanks
Sanket
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

If the information just needs to remain available, I would have thought that
once at the beginning of the table (header) and once at the end (footer)
would suffice.
 
S

Sanket

Thanks for all your help. I have got a some code from the internet and
modified it to get things going a bit. I am glad that things are working a
bit, albiet slowly.

Regards,
Sanket
 
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