Moving Part of a Footer Down a Line

Let's say that you have a custom footer that you want at the bottom of all the pages in your worksheet. Left-justified in the footer, you want the full path name for the worksheet, and centered you want a page indicator in the format of Page X of Y.

Because the full path name can be rather long, it is possible that the path will "overprint" the page indicator. This, obviously, is not something you want to do. A better solution would be to push the page indicator down a line, so that it prints on its own line. Toward that end, you try the following:

1. Choose Page Setup from the File menu. Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box.
2. Make sure the Header/Footer tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)



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

3. Click the Custom Footer button. Excel displays the Footer dialog box.
4. With the insertion point in the Left Section area, click the folder tool. The code &[Path]&[File] appears in the Left Section area. (The folder tool is not available in Excel 97 or Excel 2000, and using the &[Path] code in those versions will not work.)
5. With the insertion point in the Center Section area, you press Shift+Enter to move to the next line, then type Page followed by a space.
6. Click the page number tool, type " of " and click the pages tool. The Center Section area now contains "Page &[Page] of &[Pages]", with a blank line before it.
7. Close all the dialog boxes by clicking OK, as necessary.

When you print your worksheet, you think that the Shift+Enter keystroke (step 5) should move the center section of the footer down by a line. Unfortunately, it does not—Excel ignores the keystroke and places the center section of the footer on the first line, where it is overprinted by the left section of the footer. Drats!

The solution to the problem—without using a macro—is to follow these steps:

1. Choose Page Setup from the File menu. Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box.
2. Make sure the Header/Footer tab is displayed.
3. Click the Custom Footer button. Excel displays the Footer dialog box.
4. Make sure that all the sections of the footer are cleared; they should have nothing in them.
5. With the insertion point in the Left Section area, enter the following, just as you see it here:

     &[Path]&[File]
     &CPage &[Page] of &[Pages]

6. Make sure that you split the lines by pressing Shift+Enter at the end of the first line. (If you are using Excel 97 or Excel 2000, leave out the &[Path] code.)
7. Close all the dialog boxes by clicking OK, as necessary.

Notice the inclusion of the &C code at the beginning of the second line in step 5. This tells Excel that everything after it should be centered. The cool thing about doing the footer this way is that Excel, if necessary, will move down a line in order to print the centered information. If it can print the left portion of the footer on the same line as the center portion (the part after &C), then it will do so.

It is interesting to note that in my testing, simply putting a carriage return (Shift+Enter) at the end of whatever is in the Left Section area, and then entering information in the Center Section area still produced an overprint. The only way that this technique worked is if I used the &C code to center the page indicator.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2961) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Moving Part of a Footer Down a Line.