Excel headers and footers

There's something to be said about putting some polish and professionalism into your deliverables.  One of the ways of doing that is to make sure they have headers and footers with some basic information:

• Title
• File name
• File save location
• Page numbers
• Date

It's also wise, especially for Excel documents for the pages to be formatted so when your client prints them, they print nicely without your client having to set the page margins and page breaks themselves.
These kinds of things can be relatively easy to set in Word but in Excel, if you have different worksheets in a single workbook, you have to set these on each worksheet.  Here's a quick and easy way to set the Headers, Footers, and page settings once and apply them to all your worksheets.
With Excel open to your workbook, select all the worksheets you wan to apply the settings to by selecting the tabs at the bottom of Excel.  To select multiple, contiguous sheets, hold down the {shift} key while selecting the first and last sheets with your mouse.  To select multiple, non-contiguous sheets, hold down the {ctrl} key while using your mouse to select the sheets.

(The selects tabs are shown in white.  The un-selected tab is in grey.)

Add your headers by going to "Insert" in the Ribbon, and selecting "Header & Footer."  Use the "Header & Footer Elements" to add things like the File Name, Sheet Name, and Page Numbers.


Now, your headers and footers will apply to all your selected sheets.

You can apply page settings, like page orientation, margins, and page scale in the same way by going to "Page Layout" in the Ribbon.
For the Title, I don't usually use Headers but instead, use the first few rows of each sheet.  I like the way this looks better, especially because the Headers and Footers don't appear on the sheet when its opened so your client at least knows what's he's looking at when he opens the file.


This applies to all the selected sheets, too, so be careful to leave these rows open so you don't overwrite any of your data.
Happy deliverable-creating,
-Ann