Here’s a typical situation. You’re creating a document with a number of sections, so you go in and set different headers for the first page. But, when you look at your document, it appears that this setting hasn’t been applied!

Let’s open the header and footer view and see if we can figure out the problem.

You can see that the top of the second header says Same as Previous. That means that although we have set a different header for the first page, the link hasn’t been broken between the headers. By default, a change made in one header or footer applies to all headers or footers, so you must manually un-link the headers or footers to reverse that change. Headers and footers are linked and un-linked separately, so in the sample above, we can break the link for the headers but leave the page numbering in the footers intact.

To break the link between headers, we’ll place our cursor in the first heading we want to unlink and click the Link to Previous () button. (Note that the name of this button does not change whether you are linking or unlinking headers and footers; it will, however, appear toggled if linking is on.)

Let’s look at the results after clicking that button:

Now the Same as Previous text is missing, but our header is still the same. Let’s clear the text out of the header on the second page and see what happens:

You can see that there is now a header on the first page only. Deleting the text from the header on the second page removed all subsequent headers, but did not affect the header on the first page.

Other settings, such as different headers for odd and even pages, may need to be adjusted in the Page Setup dialog box for each section, as these settings typically apply to the entire document.