Headers and footers are an integral part of formal documents that can include the document title, author, date, page number and anything you like. If you’re putting together a thesis, presentation, novel or something else, these page elements help the reader navigate the document. They also make it look much more professional. This tutorial is going to show you how to add or remove headers and footers in Google Docs.
If you wish to remove a page along with its contents, follow this step – Select the contents of the page and then hit the “Delete” key. Note: If the page you want to delete is the last page, then you need to select the contents of that page and then hit the “Backspace” key twice. Adding a Header to your Document on Google Docs. Open a blank document on your Google Docs. To add a header, click on your first page of the document, then click on Insert, and find the tab for Header and Page Number. When you bring your cursor to ‘Header and Page Number’ the tab will extend and show you the options out of which you need to.
Also see our article How To Cleanly Export From Google Docs to HTML
Adding a header and footer does take up page space but can help the reader understand the document they are reading. The header goes at the top of the page and would typically have the document title and perhaps the author. The footer goes at the bottom, foot, of the page and will likely have page number and maybe any website or author hyperlinks.
Using headers and footers is personal preference for personal documents but usually mandatory for academic and professional documents. I’ll first show you how to do it in a browser and then on Android.
Add a header to Google Docs
If you want to add a header to Google Docs, you can do so quite easily.
- Log into Google Docs and open the first page of your document.
- Select Insert and hover over Header & Page Number.
- Select Header and enter the text you want to add.
- Select anywhere outside of the header box to commit.
If you find the header takes up too much space, you can repeat Steps 1 and 2 above and select Options in the bottom right of the header box. You can adjust the height of the header there.
Add a footer to Google Docs
Adding a footer is a very similar process. Basically you select Footer instead of Header and go from there.
- Open the first page of your document.
- Select Insert and hover over Header & Page Number.
- Select Footer and enter the text you want to add.
- Select anywhere outside of the footer box to save.
If you want to include a page number, that’s a separate setting within the Header & Page Number menu. Just select Page Number and set a position from one of the four diagrammatic options in the menu.
Remove a header from Google Docs
Removing a header is just as straightforward and returns your page back to the default full page text setting.
- Open the first page of your document.
- Double click the header area of that page.
- Select Ctrl + A to select all text in the header.
- Hit Delete to delete it all.
- Click anywhere outside the header box to commit.
As you can see, all you need to do is delete your header entry and the box disappears.
Remove a footer from Google Docs
Removing a footer from Google Docs is just as straightforward and has the same effect.
- Open the first page of your document.
- Select Insert and hover over Header & Page Number.
- Select Footer and select Ctrl + A to select all text.
- Hit Delete to delete it all.
- Select anywhere outside of the footer box to save.
The footer box will disappear and your page will return to normal.
Add or remove headers in Android
The principle is the same if you’re working on a document in Android but the commands are slightly different.
- Open the first page of your document.
- Select the pencil icon to edit the document.
- Select the three dot menu icon and select Print Layout.
- Select the header box in the document and enter your text.
- Select outside the header box to save.
Once added, you just need to select the header again to modify the text and it will be reflected in every header.
To remove the header, select it, select all text and delete the same as on desktop. The header box will disappear.
Add or remove footers in Android
Footers use the same principle for adding and removing.
- Open the first page of your document.
- Select the pencil icon to edit.
- Select the three dot menu icon and then Print Layout.
- Select the footer box and add your text.
- Select anywhere outside the box to save.
If you want to remove the footer from your Doc, you can using similar commands. Select the footer box, select all the text and delete it. Then select out of the footer box and you’re done.
Google Docs may look simple but it hides some important features within that plain interface. If you ever need to play with headers and footers in Google Docs, you now know how!
Active7 years, 3 months ago
EDIT : added an answer because edit would have been to long (see answer2)
Following a former post about document merging I ended up with a working script (Thanks Henrique ;) but I still have one small issue : the final 'merged' document contains sometimes blank pages (depending of other docs content) that I would like to remove.I cannot find an easy way to do this.The script goes like this :
The 'PageBreak' causes (sometimes) a blank page , I know that(!), but it is necessary to keep a perfect page layout (I'm printing labels with this doc).here is a link to a typical example
Community♦
Serge insasSerge insas37.3k44 gold badges6464 silver badges9494 bronze badges
2 Answers
Well Serge, I don't think there's anything on the API to tell which page an element belongs. So, solving this will be tricky :)
Right of the bat, I think of an 'inside' approach. I mean, you know which page is giving you trouble. If it is always the same (e.g. you have a fixed number of labels), you could just loop counting the page breaks and remove the bad one.
But if that's no possible, which is my guess, at least you know your layout. You could test to see how many labels fit a page exactly and then count your labels, so that when it happens, you skip appending the page-break. That looks like a better solution.
Then again, depending on your layout, that might not be possible or just too difficult. So, the last thing I can think of is to check the Document DOM to see if any specific pattern happens when a page-break is alone on a page. Since that's kind of weird, I guess Google Docs probably automatically inserts an empty paragraph on this page, so it's not 'childless', or something like it, maybe even a property, I don't know. What I know is that this will require a good amount of effort, doing an investigation to understand deeply how the Document DOM works. If you don't do it, I'll probably have to in the future as I work with document as templates like this a lot. When I do I'll update my answer, if you haven't done it before me :)
Henrique G. AbreuHenrique G. Abreu14.4k11 gold badge4343 silver badges5757 bronze badges
I modified the script so that it gives me constant results and wrote an analyse function to get the structure of the document. I found it's probably a better idea to put all this in an answer rather than edit my first question because it's a bit long.1° the simplified script :
2° the analyse function :
and finally the result of this analyse :
(the ' * ' are paragraphs added by the script, the 'NOT_FOUND' are the tables)So, now I know that pagebreaks are shown as paragraphs, that the doc creates by itself paragraphs between tables (which causes the blank pages) but even when I try to remove unwanted paragraphs using element.removeFromParent(), I keep having these blank pages...I'm a bit lost right now ;-)Sorry for being so long.
Serge insasSerge insas37.3k44 gold badges6464 silver badges9494 bronze badges