How to Create Dynamically Updated Running Headers and Footers in MS Word

By Ugur Akinci

Running headers and footers are a great way to keep track of where you are in an MS Word document. The longer the document and more indented levels the headings have, the more useful running headers and footers prove to be.
You can create running headers and footers that are dynamically updated from one page to another very easily with MS Word 2007.
Let’s imagine you are working with the following sample document (click to enlarge the images):

As you can see, the title of the document is formatted with the TITLE paragraph style; and the headings are formatted with the HEADING 1 paragraph style.
We would like to repeat the TITLE at the top of every page heading. And underneath that, we would like to display automatically the first HEADING 1 style heading on that specific change.
Thus the TITLE should remain same from page to page but the HEADING 1 style change if there is a new HEADING 1 paragraph on that particular page.

1) Create a new Heading (Insert > Header > Blank).
2) Click and select Insert > Quick Parts > Field to display the Field screen:

3) Select StyleRef field name and and Title for style name. Click OK to insert the title into the Type Text place holder. The document TITLE appears automatically in the header area:

4) Press Enter to move on to the next line in the header area. Repeat the same steps but this time select HEADING 1 for style name:

The FIRST Heading 1 style text of the page appears on the second line:

5) Let’s go to the page 3 of the sample document. You will see that even though the document TITLE remains the same (since there is only one title to the whole document), the HEADING 1 text has changed, displaying the FIRST Heading 1 style text on that page:

Repeat the same steps for dynamically updated FOOTERS.
NOTE: You can edit the running headers and footers in any way you like by using the font and paragraph designing controls on the HOME tab of your MS Word 2007 ribbon.