What happened to my header and footer in Writer?

[LewG2]

I’m editing a Writer file and suddenly the header and footer disappeared. It’s important because I had links in the header to navigate to different places within the file.

The display looks just like the Web view except that I can see where the page breaks. Insert/Header and Footer doesn’t show a place to edit/add text to either. In Format/Page Style, then header or footer, then More – I can’t edit/add them there either. So I can’t even re-create them.

I have no idea what I did. What might have caused this?

Addendum: An old odt file is normal/as it used to be. New documents that I create now behave as described above. My custom default ott file also behaves this way when I call it up with manage templates.

[Wanderer]

@LewG2

I have no idea what I did. What might have caused this?

No clue, but try safe-mode to see, if it is caused by your user-profile or your file.
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/01/profile_safe_mode.html

Maybe I should mention: It is quite useful to have backups, if you suspect something “spreading” and ruining your files. But choice is yours.

[ajlittoz]

Difficult to give any useful help: you didn’t help us to understand the issue. You didn’t provide any useful technical information such as OS name nor LO version. I take for granted your documents are .odt and .ott*.

If your documents used to show as expected, you probably pressed inadvertently some unexpected key combination but which one?

Edit your question to attach at least a screenshot showing the entire window (full with title bar, menus and status bar – if on MacOS, full screen with menu bar). Usually screenshots are not informative enough but your issue does not seem to be related to documents.

As an afterthought, check if View>Whitespace is disabled. It hides all excess whitespace and also header/footer to show maximum text contents in a compact form.