Word 2003 - Margins and Header/Footer

[SV]

Greetings,
My apologies if this has been covered, I'm having some trouble comprehending
how things interact:
I'm using Word 2003 in XP-Professional.

If I go to File > Page Setup and view the Margins tab, the Top and Bottom
settings are "how close to the top and bottom edge the body text will try to
go before opening another page."

If I then go to the Layout tab, the Header and Footer settings are the same:
Won't go closer to the edge than the listed value.

If I have a footer setting of 0.5" and my footer information takes up 0.5"
of space, then I have a 0.5" high footer that starts 0.5" from the bottom,
for a total of 1" of space taken up by the footer.

Because the footer takes up a total of 1" from the bottom, even if my
"Bottom" margin is set for 0.5", the footer will 'block' it and it'll just
have to go to the next page.

Does it sound like I've got the interactions between Body and Footer right?

Also - here's the fun part - I'd like my header and footer to have margins
0.5" from the left and right edges, and the body text to have margins 1"
from the left and right edges. Is that possible? I'd like to avoid using
the Styles and increasing my values by 0.5" because I think that'll only
work on the left side of the page.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Shane

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

When the footer margin is set to the default 0.5", that means that the
*bottom* of the footer is at 0.5". If the bottom margin is set to the
default 1", then you have 0.5" for the footer before it begins to push the
bottom margin up. Ordinarily this is adequate (for just a page number of one
or two lines of text). The same relationship exists between the header and
top margins. But you can take advantage of this to have what appears to be a
different margin on the first page of a document (by putting more text or
extra space in the First Page Header).

For more on these subjects, see these articles:

http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/HeaderFooter.htm

http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/Letterhead.htm

http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/BottomLine.htm