How to Create Different Headers on Each Page in Word

If you are writing long documents with many chapters then a good practice is to have the chapter and title of that chapter in either the header or footer of each page within that chapter. For example, every page in chapter 2 should say chapter 2.

In this tutorial I will show you how you can put a different header on 3 different pages in Microsoft Word.

Step 1 Launch Microsoft Word and start a blank new document. Then go to a website where you can grab some text to follow along in this tutorial. I am going to use the USA today website to grab a few snippets of news. It doesn't matter what the text is as you will soon see.

Step 2 Pick a story from the website and copy some of the text and paste it into your word document and hit the enter key a couple of times to create a couple blank lines.. The first page of your word doc should look similar to mine just with different text.

Step 3 Hit the CTRL+ENTER key to create a new 2nd page.

Step 4 Copy the next paragraph from your news source and paste it on page 2 and hit enter a couple of times to create a couple of blank lines.

Step 5 Hit the CTRL+ENTER key to create a new 3rd page.

Step 6 Copy the next paragraph from your news source and paste it on page 3 and hit enter a couple of times to create a couple of blank lines.

Step 7 Go back to page one and click anywhere on the page to put the cursor there.

Step 8 Click on "view" from the main menu at the top, and then click on "header/footer" in the submenu that appears as shown in the picture associated with this step.

Step 9 In the header section, type in "NEWS SOURCE PAGE 1".

Step 10 Click the "close" button on the header/footer toolbar as shown in the picture.

Step 11 You will now notice the header is the same on every page, we are about to fix that. On the first page put the cursor on the very last blank line. Remember earlier I had you hit enter a few times to create a couple of blanks lines? Put the cursor there.

Step 12 Click on "insert" from the main menu at the top and then click on "break" as shown in the picture.

Step 13 When the "brek" window appears select "continuous" underneath the "section break types" heading.

Step 14 Go to page 2 and double click the header on that page to activate it.

Step 15 Turn off the "link to previous" option by clicking the icon on the header and footer toolbar. The icon is circled in red in the picture and is the 4th icon from to the left of the close button. Doing that gives you the ability to make the header on this page different than the previous.

Step 16 Change the "1" to a "2" in the header text so it now reads "NEWS SOURCE PAGE 2" and click the close button. You will now notice that the page 1 header is different from the page 2 header, however the page 3 header is identical to page 2.

Step 17 In order to change the page 3 header you follow the same steps as above. Put the cursor on the last blank link pn page 2, just like you did on page 1.

Step 18 Then goto "Insert", then "break" and then choose "continuous" when the break window appears.

Step 19 Go to page 3 and double click the header on that page to activate it.

Step 20 Turn off the "link to previous" option by clicking the icon on the header and footer toolbar just like you did earlier in this tutorial.

Step 21 Change the "2" to a "3" in the header text so it now reads "NEWS SOURCE PAGE 3" and click the close button. You will now notice that the page 1 header is different from the page 2 and the page 3 header is different than page 2 creating a different on 3 different pages.