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February 15, 2003
In-Service
By Jeffrey Branzburg
This page is designed specifically with the new-to-technology educator in mind. Please feel free to reproduce it for use in your teacher training sessions or other staff development efforts.
Watermarks, Headers, and Footers
In the dawn of the word processing age, the 1980s, the fact that we could change font size and style was amazing. Now, so many text management features are available that entire books have been laid out using only a word processor.
While most of us will never use many of the high-powered features of our word processors, some of them, such as watermarks, headers, and footers, can easily enhance the look of our documents.
Watermarks
A watermark is a light-contrast image underneath your text. Here are two examples, one with a picture and one with text as the watermark. Notice how each increases the effectiveness of the topic of the document:
Watermarks can be easily created in most word processors. Start by locating the image you would like as the watermark. Use the image formatting capability of your word processor to lighten the image sufficiently. In a program such as AppleWorks, you would use the drawing tools. In Microsoft Word, you must choose how the image will interact with the text. I chose "under text" so that my typing would cover the picture.
To create the "Congratulations!" watermark, I used the WordArt feature of Word, which creates a picture from text you enter. I then lightened it and typed the text over it.
You can also use watermarks to mark a document as confidential or as a draft. Visit the Microsoft Word Web site for more watermark examples.
Headers and Footers
Headers and footers are areas in the top and bottom margins of each page in a document. Either text or graphics can be inserted in headers and footers in most word processors. Common choices for headers and footers might be the page number, the date, the author's name, a picture of the school mascot, or the document's title-anything you would like printed at the top or bottom of each page in a document. You can even specify one header for the title page and another for subsequent pages, or have different headers on right- and left-hand pages.
Just as in other parts of a word processed document, you can apply various fonts and styles (such as bold or italic) to the text in the header or footer.
Inserting a header or a footer is as easy as making a choice from a menu (the View menu in Word and the Format menu in AppleWorks, for example) and typing in the information you would like. By clicking the page number button you can place a page number on each page. As you add more pages the number will automatically readjust.
Below is an example of a two-page document with both a header and a footer. The header has a logo; the footer shows how page numbers are treated. Notice how the logo is the same on each page, while the page number increases as we go from page 1 to page 2.
Some additional information that can be put in a header or footer includes the file's name, the name of the person who created the file, the date the file was created, when the file was last printed, and the name of the person who last saved the file.
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