when you work in Google Docs and you have a fairly complicated document you may decide that you would like to add in headers and Footers that maybe have a chapter name or a date or maybe even the document name or a company logo and it is easy enough to do but there are some considerations when you add in headers and Footers we'll look at those today hi I'm Terry one of the consumer technology Specialists for Mid-Continent Public Library and let's look at Google Docs and headers and Footers as we
look at our example document today we can see that we've started just kind of adding in how we think the manuscript is going to look when it's finished and so for example whether this is a kind of official professional report of some kind or whether it's a family history where you just want to share information about relatives that you have and share this information with your cousins and close relatives or whether it's some other kind of manuscript maybe you're writing a fiction of some kind w
hatever it is this is your very important manuscript and when we click in the title here we can see that it is even already styled for title and then when I click on introduction it shows me that that is already styled as heading one and then we just have some placeholder text with the idea that the introduction will probably not be much longer than that when I come down to chapters one two and three and I click on chapter one and see that it is heading two so it's kind of a given that chapter 2
and chapter 3 also are styled as heading to they also have placeholder text but I have a pretty good understanding of what I'm writing and so chances are each one of these chapters could be anywhere from 2 to 25 pages and of course there's a huge possibility that I will add more chapters as I go on but if I get this document kind of pre-planned it's going to be so much easier to actually type in my document and style it so that when people get this manuscript whatever it is it will be so much e
asier to read and understand and will help people find where they are in the document if it's really big one of the first things that I would like to do is look at my documents kind of seriously here and think about sections within a document now each section acts independently of every other section so a section could be landscape for example and then another one could have very different kinds of fonts or layout or margins and yet they are still within the same document well I don't really pla
n on doing anything quite so fancy but if this is for example a family history I might decide that I want to put a sixth generation chart that would be landscape in one of these sections and so to make sure that I have the sections ahead of time I'm going to already get in the habit of adding sections so I'm going to click here just before chapter one I think the title and then the introduction can all be on the same page and then starting at the very beginning here of chapter one I'm going to g
o up to my menu bar and I'm going to go to insert and then what I am looking for is break so it's almost down at the bottom here where I have break now as I hover my mouse on break I can see that I could add in a page break and I might want to do that within a section but not to create a section and then I have a choice of a section break which means that as I create that section I'm also in this case in my first choice with next page going to start that section on a new page if I put in a secti
on break and I make it continuous I add in the section break but the text stays on the same page as where I am well we're going to go with Section break next page and so as we look at our document I'm going to scroll up very quickly here here is my page one it has my title and my introduction and then it has a dashed Blue Line showing that I've got this section break going on and as I scroll down to page two I have chapter one right there now if I want to have a new section for chapter one I rea
lly think I need a new section for chapter two as well well I just do the same thing I'm going to go to insert and down to break and then section break next page and click and chapter 2 is now on its own page except we need to still add another section break for chapter three so I'll click at the very beginning of chapter three and as I go to the menu bar and go to insert I'll come down to break and add a section break next page and so I have as I look at this kind of going backwards but you can
see as I hover my mouse over on the scroll bar on the right it says we have chapter 3 404 we have chapter two which is three of four we have chapter one which is 204 and we have page one of four the introduction let's add in some page numbers and it seems like page numbers should be relatively simple but sections let us get a little more advanced a little more complicated so first of all though let's go to insert in our menu bar and then we are looking for page numbers and so page numbers are a
ctually right below headers and Footers but we'll go to page numbers and then as I hover my mouse I can see that I could add them to the headers or I could add them to the Footers or I could come down to more options well let's go ahead and just put it on the footer I tend to like that one in the lower right and then if I want to change something about this page number in my footer I can go to options that's on the far right here and click the drop down and so I can go to page numbers and this s
hould give me some page number options as I look at this it says do I want to apply page numbers only to this section well no I don't think so so let's click this drop down and notice that I could add it to this section going forward and not anything prior to where I've clicked or I can just apply them to the whole document which is what I think I'll do now again it kind of double checks to make sure that the page numbers are going to be in the footer which is what I selected and then do I want
to show them on the first page well generally the very first page of a professional document does not have a page number so it depends on what this is as to whether I show that page number or not I think I'm going to uncheck it just so that we can kind of see how that looks and then though this numbering well even though that first page number is going to be invisible it's still going to start at one and then we'll click apply and let's go up to the top of our document so here we have our introd
uction on our first page and there's no page number as we come down to chapter one then and we're on page two it shows us page two so the rest should be very consistent our next chapter is on page three and it shows the three and as we come down to the last page in the last chapter it shows us page four and with each of these notice that to help you figure out where you are and what you're working with if you look at this bar that's on top of the footer it even shows you that this is a footer se
ction four for example or if I scroll up footer section three so it's easier to find where you are and be sure that you're affecting what you want to affect within your headers and Footers because this is such an important document I've decided that I would like to add a table of contents people might want to go to say chapter 5 and skip two and three for example so I need to give them a way to find what they're looking for easily and probably the most common way to do that is table of contents
so I'm going to click just before my very important manuscript and then I'm going to go to insert in my menu bar I have to scroll way down here to find the very last thing which is table of contents and I would like to add in a table of contents that has page numbers so I'm going to click on that and well I have a table of contents but generally that table of contents isn't on the first page of your manuscript so what we're going to do is Click again just before my very important manuscript inse
rt but this time we're going to insert a break and we want to again add in a section break next page so we have table of contents next page is the introduction [Music] now you can tell we have that page break and as I scroll up we have our table of contents now it doesn't say table of contents so let me add that in as well here is something you're going to want to always double check because as good as the table of contents looks with the introduction on the first page and chapter three on the f
ourth page everything looking good when I come down to actually look at the introduction and I scroll down to the page number it says two even though the table of contents says one well this happens from time to time and so what we need to do is figure out how to break the connection between the table of contents and its possible page numbering and then the rest of the document and its page numbering what we're going to do is come down to our introduction page and I'm going to double click in th
e footer to turn it on when I do looking above that number two it says we are linking to previous which means this page is connected to the table of contents page let's do this let's uncheck it now that is kind of sad because what it shows me is the page numbers have disappeared because I turned them off or I didn't add them on the table of contents I can go to options then and come back to page numbers and I can say this section going forward but certainly not the whole document because I don't
want to include the table of contents footer now I still need to decide do I want to show it on the first page and maybe for just us being able to see what's going on we'll say okay now we're going to have it start at 1. we don't want it to continue from the previous section and then we're going to apply it's moved my page number over to the left but I can come up to the toolbar and instead of left aligning I can select right aligning and then there's page one so now let's look at what we have
starting at the beginning we have the table of contents it says that introduction is on page one as we come down in the table of contents and there is no page number here coming down to introduction then now we have a page one coming down from here our next page is page two and notice that it is linked to the previous section now we come down to the next to the last page and it is Page Three notice it is also linked to the previous section and then as we come down to our last section here is Pag
e four and it is linked to the previous section so as we look at this kind of daisy chain of how the formatting is done everything in my manuscript is linked to however I decided to format this section here section 2 which has my introduction but because I added in a section the table of contents is its own thing and it does not have a page number starting at the top of my document I might decide that I want to add in some other kinds of things to the footer so for example where I have this tabl
e of contents Google Docs really only allows you to use Arabic numbers and yet this table of contents should probably use a romanette font for the number so Romania is pretty much the lowercase I so I could click in the footer here and just type a lowercase i and manually put in a page number if that's something that I want to do coming on down then to section two which is really our page one I might decide to add in some other kinds of things for example I might want to go to the right of the o
ne and press enter o and type family history now I would like to Center family history so let's see if I can come up to my toolbar and Center a line and that works pretty well but now if I decide that I want to add to the left of the one and try to keep that on the same line I could press the tab key if I get far enough out I could use a backspace key potentially but let's type in a date and then I can't if I have text actually tab over a little bit and maybe even tab it clear over to the left b
ut notice that it's going to adjust on me and probably not do exactly what I would like for it to do and you're just going to kind of need to use your backspace and it looks like centering is about as far as we can go here then if I click on October and Center it does let me do that now if I left a line it it's still not going to let me go very far is it and again it's this series of tabs perhaps and Backspaces and other spaces and you may need to just kind of play to make this work the way you
would like for it to you could insert a picture or an emoji let me see if I right align it and use tab then it goes to a different line so so it seems that about halfway on this page is where it just kind of says no more so it's something that you will want to deal with I think I'm going to just kind of undo a couple things here and let my October 2000 whatever be centered on the same line as my page one and be happy with that and be really happy that at least I have the title of my document her
e maybe make that bold and italics and maybe even a little bit larger just to make it kind of stand out and now as I come down look at that page two has the same information because of link to previous and as I come down page three link to previous so I had the same thing and so link to previous copies the Footers or the headers from one section to another section if you don't want the same header or footer all you do is uncheck the link to previous box headers also use the idea of link to previ
ous so let's look at how that would work our table of contents is beautiful the way it is but let's come down to our page one in our very important manuscript now I can double click to get into my header I could have also let me click off of here just a second I could have also gone to insert and then headers and Footers and notice that this gives you the keyboard shortcuts for headers and Footers I think I'd rather double click which is what I do to open that header we could add in some sort of
a header that is going to go through this part of our document and for introduction it seems like introduction would be a good thing to write and I can click off and there it is that looks really nice and you can kind of picture that as it would show in a book but now let's go back up to the table of contents and look at that that also has nothing there which is really good and then let's come down to the header for chapter one and it says introduction well no we would want this to be chapter o
ne or maybe the Smith family so let's double click in the header and just as we found out with the footer link to previous is causing the issues so we're going to uncheck that box and now we can type whatever we want let's type Smith family and I'd like to write a line that when I go back up to the top I still have the table of contents without any kind of a problem I have the introduction with this introduction header I have chapter one as the Smith family and this could go for pages and pages
but we have the section break so then we're going to go down to chapter 2 the insta Smith family well we'd simply double click in that header remove that link to previous and then we can type in say the Jones family and again I would like to write a line it and then I can click off of the header to kind of set that into stone now as I come down to chapter three we can probably predict that yes Jones family is going to show up here so let's double click because we didn't turn off link to previous
yet we'll turn it off by clicking and we'll just type Adam's Family and again right align it and then I'm going to just click in the text itself so starting at the beginning table of contents doesn't have anything in the header but in the footer we have the romanip one because we broke all sorts of links to previous introduction has a header of introduction and down at the bottom in the footer we have that it is page one and we have a date and we have that this is the overall family history com
ing down from there in chapter one we can see that chapter one is going to be about the Smith family and whether it's two pages or 50 pages it doesn't matter because we have our section break that separates the Smith family from the other sections and then coming down on that page we also of course have a copied footer of the date and the page number and that it's the family history and then running down we have the Jones family and again it's not copied from the previous section so chapter two
will be all about the Joneses whatever that means and then we'll scroll down a little bit farther to find that yes this is three but this part of the footer is linking to the previous footer so it's copied it down [Music] and then in chapter three we have The Adams Family again because we broke that header link and as we come down even farther we were able to though link to the previous footer so we again have a page number that's incrementing and then we also have the date and the manuscript na
me now this is something that you want so remember to do is to always double check the page numbers always make sure as you move from section to section that what you put in one section doesn't affect another section and if it does to break that link and generally you're going to start at the top of your document and work your way down to the end to learn even more be sure to go to mymcpl.org forward slash online learning for such great resources as universal class LinkedIn learning Learning Exp
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