Microsoft Word: Current heading on every page in the document

Academic papers and professional documents contain various elements to help the reader understand the structure and find their way around at any point. In addition to a table of contents and headings at different levels, this includes displaying the current chapter heading on each page in the header. The prerequisite for this is the consistent use of style sheets for the headings. The following instructions show you an easy way to do this.

Solution and instructions

The task is easier than expected: Each page of a document in Microsoft Word has a footer and header. These are the respective top and bottom sections of each page, which can have the same content across multiple pages - without having to add the content again for each page.

Our aim is to display the current chapter heading on every page. We use the header for this purpose. You can edit these by creating a Double-click in the upper area of your page makes:

At this point, you might think to enter the current heading manually. However, a much more elegant way is to use the Field functions that can automatically insert the current chapter heading as text. You can find the field functions in the current "Design" tab under Quick blocks → Field:

In the new window, select Field name "StyleRef" off. The background to this is that we want to refer to a specific format template - a style - and then insert this content into the header.

As the style name, select the style in which you have formatted the headings that you want to insert in the header. Experience has shown that "Heading 1" and/or "Heading 2" are generally recommended. It is also possible to insert the "StyleRef" field function several times and reference different headings or other style sheets by simply repeating this process.

Now you can see your chosen heading on each page of your document. And the best thing is that these automatically updatedyou should add new headings, move or delete headings:

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