How can I eliminate a blank footer in Word 2002?

[Guest]

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Type something in it? I think you'll have to use the message space to better
describe what you're doing, what you expect to happen, and what is happening
instead.

Ah, wait. I think I know what the problem is. You created a footer, deleted
all the content, but still have an empty paragraph. That's a gotcha in Word
2002. If you ever so much as View | Header and Footer in that app (perhaps I
exaggerate somewhat), you get stuck with an undeletable footer paragraph.
The only solution is to start over with a fresh document or reduce the
footer margin to 0".

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

I don't think you are exaggerating a bit... and 2003 appears to have carried
on the tradition!

Regards |:>)

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I was hoping it might have been fixed in Word 2003 (which is why I didn't
mention it); after being stung in Word 2002, I've been *very* careful.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[CyberTaz]

If it's any consolation, the Mac is the same way. Actually, I believe the
headers/footers are *always* there even if you don't access them. Its just
that you never have reason to think about it until _after_ you have. I
partly base that belief on the fact that when you go into Page Setup in a
brand new blank doc the H/F margins are already set. Why the margins if
there aren't yet H/F, he queries?

Oh well, at least they don't come pre-loaded with unwanted content the way
XL did for so many years.

Regards |:>)

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There has been considerable play made with the fact that you don't "Insert"
a header or footer; you "View" it. That is, it is on the View menu. The
empty header and footer exist, but Word ignores them until you put text in
them.

In earlier versions of Word, if you put something in the header and then
deleted it, you were left with a paragraph mark, which you could get rid of
by a sort of dance with the text boundaries display. This could have been
regarded as something that was annoying only to geeks (like me) who had
nonprinting characters displayed or were offended by empty paragraphs. It
was annoying but harmless.

The real problem came in Word 2002 when the empty paragraph was not just
notional but actually took up space, causing problems in, for example,
labels, which tend to have smaller top and bottom margins. In earlier
versions, if you set the top margin to half an inch (as is typical for
labels), it didn't matter that the header margin was also 0.5", provided
that there was no header. In Word 2002, if you have an indelible empty
paragraph in the header (at 0.5") and a top margin of 0.5", the top margin
is pushed down to 0.6", which of course messes up the labels. The only way
to fix this is to change the header margin to something smaller, and this
can be done only in a new labels document (preventing you from printing
labels directly from the Labels dialog) or in Normal.dot (which will affect
*all* new documents. Very messy.

Surprisingly, I think this may be fixed in Word 2003. I have a document
template (which I think originated in Word 2002) that has an empty paragraph
in the header (because I modified the Header style in the header rather than
through Format Style). In Word 2003, if I delete that empty paragraph, it
doesn't appear to be affected while the header is open, but when I close the
header, it's gone. Having made this discovery, I have now (I think) "cured"
the template.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.