Microsoft Word never ceases to surprise me. There have been many occasions when I have had to carry out a rarely called upon task and have discovered that Word has a function to perform that very job. For example, I have just written an article on how to convert text accidentally written in capitals back into lower case. What a time saver that turned out to be.

So supposing I wanted to take all of this knowledge and pass it on in the form of a sixty-page document entitled "Everything You Wanted To Know About Word, But Were Afraid To Ask". It would be a nice touch to have a footer on each page displaying the title of the document, with the words 'Everything You Wanted To Know About Word' on the left hand, even numbered pages (in printers' terms this is called the verso), and 'But Were Afraid To Ask' on the right hand, odd numbered pages (the recto). This would mean that I would have to print the odd and even numbered pages separately, unless Word had a way to print different footers on each page. You may not be surprised to learn that Word can print different headers and footers on each of the two pages quite easily.

Here's what to do for the above document. Go to File/Page Setup and click the Layout tab, check the Different Odd & Even box and click OK. Back in the document go to View/Header and Footer. This will bring up the Header and Footer toolbar and the dashed lined boxes that indicate where the header or footer will go. At the bottom of the first page, the footer box will be labelled Odd Page Footer, and type in here "Everything You Wanted To Know About Word". Entering the text for my footer is no more difficult than typing into a text box.

Scroll down to the foot of page two, where the box will be labelled Even Page Footer. Type "But Were Afraid To Ask" into this box, then close the Header and Footer toolbar and the dashed outlines disappear and my footers are in place in a lighter shade of text to that of the body text.

In the document above I would have already numbered the pages on the bottom right and so the footers are positioned at the left, perfectly in line with the left hand margin of the body text.

It is worth looking more closely at the header and footer toolbar, as it contains some rather surprising functions. For example, if you were to place your cursor into one of the header or footer boxes and then click on the clock shaped icon on the toolbar, the current time would be entered in that box.

Headers and footers are a handy tool in the Word repertoire, and exploring the ways they can be used is a useful exercise in understanding document layout. Although many people only ever use Word for typing letters, those who delve further into its capabilities discover that is really is a most powerful tool and the ultimate in word-processing applications.