Sections, headers

K

Ken Mayer

Word 2007. I have a document I am building that requires the use of Sections
to allow me to have different headers (the footers can mostly remain the
same). The problem I am having is when I use the new section (Page Break)
option, after about the third or fourth break, the size of the headers and
footers revert to 1" tall, while in the earlier sections they are smaller,
about the right size, really. I would like new sections to retain the size,
but I cannot seem to find any option to set the height of a header or footer.
(According to my wife this issue has been around for some time.) If this is
not possible, is there some other way to do what I need, rather than the
section breaks?

The reason I am using the headers for the different sections is because I am
using tables to layout what is basically a script (for a play) format, and
when I get to the bottom of the page, letting the table wrap over to the new
page. By doing it this way, if I need to insert/modify the script the table
automatically handles readjusting (inserting/removing rows, etc.) and I don't
have to modify the location of the headers, by turning off the table (or
having many tables for a single script, one for each page of the document,
with a manual page title added at the top of each page saying something like
"This script, continued").

I am open to being told that perhaps there's a better way to do this, but I
would love to find there's a way to resolve the problem as is, because I
don't really want to have to start over ...
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

If you're copy/pasting into the header, you're experiencing one of my
unfavorite bugs in Word. No matter how carefully you copy excluding the
paragraph mark and paste including the paragraph mark, Word will still
insert an extra, empty paragraph under the text you pasted. If you don't
have nonprinting characters displayed, you may not realize this. Those extra
paragraphs, of course, may push the top margin down. For more on
headers/footers, see http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/HeaderFooter.htm

I'm sure you're aware that you can repeat table headings without using the
header, but if you want "continued," a header is one of the easier ways of
doing it. And the StyleRef field offers a way to have varied headers without
section breaks.
 
K

Ken Mayer

Thanks for the suggestions.

After posting, I took another look (I've been messing with this on and off
all morning, and earlier this week). It appears that sometimes when you add a
new section/page break, the margins for the new section default back to the
Word default, rather than using the current settings in the document. By
going and re-setting the margins to the custom margins I had set up at the
beginning of the document, for the faulty sections, the footers and headers
are now where they should be. Truly odd. This appears to be a bug, but I
don't know how to post bug reports to Microsoft ...

Thanks again.
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

If this really is happening, it would definitely be a bug, but I am
skeptical. Could anything else account for the effect? When you set the
margins, were you careful to select "Whole document" rather than "This
section"? If you start with a single section, you shouldn't have any other
choice, but if there were more than one section... Just grasping at straws.
And of course there are some very strange things in Word 2007 (which I'm not
running yet, so I can't test it here).
 
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