Hi, I have received a document that it is supposed to split in different letters on each "Section Break (Next Page)". They told me that header and footer should repeat automatically on each "Section Break (Next Page)" but that does not happen. Are they wrong? Am I doing something wrong or maybe not doing something?

Well, it appears they are.
You can go to the ones that need to be repeating and in the Header and Footer click on the Link to Previous box.

If you go to the header in the second section, presuming it's blank or different, look on the Header and Footer ribbon close to the center, under the Navigation section, and click on "Link to Previous." That should pull the characteristics of the previous section's header through. I believe you will have to do the same in the Footer space.

I think the default is that if you put in the header and footer in the first section when creating from scratch, it will default to Link to Previous as subsequent sections are added. But I just made a dummy file to test it and "different odd and even pages" came up by default on the second section, I'm not sure why.

If you need to start a different page number sequence (for example, some of our reports have an executive summary which gets a i-ii-iii type lower case Roman numeral along with the table of contents, then the main report starts with 1-2-3), you'll use the Page Number settings on the ribbon of Header and Footer to tell it to start over.

Well I was doing the "Link to Previous" part in my work Windows laptop and it was not working...now tried in my personal MacBook and for some reason it did work. Any ways thank you both I appreciate it a lot.

Even though it looks like a Section setting, the Different Even and Odd Header/Footer Setting is a document setting that applies to both headers and footers.

For each section, there are SIX settings for link to previous. One for each kind of header and one for each kind of footer.

The default when starting a new section is to link to the previous section, so fixing it in the first section that breaks the chain may fix it for the document.

Good points. I am usually editing documents from our standard templates, so it'd been a while since I started from a clean document and created as I went. I never selected even/odd so it must be the default in my Normal template? We don't use even/odd in our docs, just "Different First Page" when letterhead or a cover sheet background is inserted.

You are welcome.


Off-topic but information that I think may help you:

Note when posting a question in a Word forum, it is important to specify whether you are using the Windows or the Mac version. You have a profile here that is set to show the Windows version and this forum does not allow for multiple versions. So, if the question was about using Word on the Mac that should be addressed in the question. For your question today, it really does not matter because it is about the document's structure, and that is the same on both platforms.

See Compare Word features on different platforms - Office Support.
· These programs are all named Word and they are all created and published by Microsoft.
· They all can edit the same document files that have the same file structure.
· But, they are different programs with different features and controls. Some of the programs have no control over some of the document structures.

As of February, 2023, the most powerful one of these, with the most features, is the Windows desktop application. I do not expect that to change.

The Macintosh desktop application is second with number of features. The things available in the Windows version not yet on the Mac version include Content Controls, Building Blocks, UserForms, and ActiveX. It can use, but cannot create, or modify most Content Controls.

The browser version of Word – Word Online – has a Transcribe feature that is not available in any of the other Word programs. Otherwise, the browser version has far fewer features and editing in it has been reported to mess up automatic numbering.

The mobile applications vary somewhat but have far fewer features. I would use them for note taking and for quick viewing/printing, but not for editing. Especially not for editing long or complex documents.