somehow the header and footer disappeared from all but page 2 and none of the settings in format header/footer allow me to set it as the same as the previous page…the only solution seems to manually recreate it for each page???
Does your document come from M$ Word? In other words, is it a .docx with several “sections”?
Have you added “special” page breaks with Insert>More Breaks>Manual Break?
Edit you question to provide more details on how you document is structured and don’t forget to mention OS name and LO version.
Please do not use Add Answer but edit your original question to enhance the details of your question (answers are reserved for solutions to a problem on this Q&A site).
I have been writing business documents for 30+ years using all kinds of wp and publishing programs…this is really – software…back to word for me…
This is not an answer to your question but a personal opinion.
Writer is based on styles. One of the categories is page style which owns the header/footer. If you have one independent header/footer per page, blame your structuring AND conversion from .docx to .odt which created many many Convert99 page styles to cope with Word bad design for pages.
Writer allows very complex formatting. Mastering it requires in turn to read the Writer Guide.
But if you feel comfortable with Word, stay with it.