Creating a Footer

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated November 10, 2021)

Excel allows you to add footers to your spreadsheet. Footers are nothing more than repeating text that appears at the bottom of every page of your printed spreadsheet. The beauty of footers is that they only have to be defined once, and then Excel places them on your printed pages automatically. To define a page footer, do the following:

  1. Select Page Setup from the File menu. Word displays the Page Setup dialog box.
  2. Make sure the Header/Footer tab is selected. (See Figure 1.)

    3. Figure 1. The Header/Footer tab of the Page Setup dialog box.

  3. Using the Footer drop-down list, select any of the predefined footers you want used with your spreadsheet.
  4. Click on OK to close the Page Setup dialog box.

If you don't like any of the predefined footers in Excel, or if you have special footer needs, you can create a custom footer. You do that by following these steps:

  1. Select Page Setup from the File menu. Word displays the Page Setup dialog box.
  2. Make sure the Header/Footer tab is selected.
  3. Click on the Custom Footer button. Word displays the Footer dialog box. (See Figure 2.)

    4. Figure 2. The Footer dialog box.

  4. In each of the three parts of the dialog box, enter the information you want to appear at the left, center, and right of the footer.
  5. When you are through defining your footer, click on OK to close the Footer dialog box.
  6. Click on OK to close the Page Setup dialog box.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2694) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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