What happened to my header and footer in Writer?

LewG2 · January 9, 2025, 10:49pm

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 · January 10, 2025, 7:04am

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 · January 10, 2025, 8:00am

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.

LewG2 · January 10, 2025, 4:21pm

Thanks. Turns out I booted up this morning, called up the file with the problem, and it was back to normal. Creating a new document also normal. Thanks for your comments.