0

I have a document where the footer has disappeared.

I don't mean that the content has disappeared; if you do View | Header and Footer and then click the button to go to the footer, it doesn't display anything and the insertion point is still in the header.

If I add additional footers (e.g. by going into page layout and setting a different footer for the first page) then the first page footer appears, but not the one for the other pages (the "Primary Footer").

2
  • It's only happening with the one document? If you go into Print Layout or Full Screen Reading modes, does the footer show as expected? Sep 7, 2011 at 17:17
  • Yeah. But I have a fix - see the self-answer - I just wanted to get it written down, because I've seen it occasionally before and I can never google the answer. I should be able to now! Sep 7, 2011 at 17:18

1 Answer 1

1

I cracked this eventually. There was a problem with the document, clearly, but there is a fix:

  • Put the document into Normal View (View | Normal)
  • Fire up VBA (Alt + F11, or Tools | Macro | Visual Basic Editor)
  • Bring up the "immediate" pane (CTRL + G or View | Immediate Window)

    ActiveDocument.Sections(1).Footers(wdHeaderFooterPrimary).Range.Select

  • You're now in a slightly odd view of the footer. You can start putting things into the footer from here, and the normal views will come back to life.

2
  • It sounds like the footer was full of just "Null"? Weird.. :) Cool you found that work-around, I'd up-vote but I'm out of votes for a few more hours. :) Sep 7, 2011 at 17:21
  • Yeah, it didn't even have the End-Of-Story marker (the heavy underline in normal view; the terminal paragraph mark in print layout view). But it would let me put content in. Eventually, I messed about a bit more and the EOS marker appeared, but I don't quite know what I did (added a field and deleted it, I think). Sep 7, 2011 at 17:25

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .