Align Header and Footer in Excel

Just like in Microsoft Office Word, we have options to manipulate the header and footer in Excel as well.

In the example below, we will show you how to add a header and footer, and how to align them in your file.

Add Header and Footer

For our example, we will use the table with NBA players and their statistics from several categories: points, rebounds, assists, and turnovers:

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Our header and footer can be virtually anything that we want, and it can be any data type: numbers, text, dates, etc. To add it, we will go to the Page Layout tab and then go to Page Setup and choose the small icon in the bottom right corner to expand the window:

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On a window that appears, we will choose the Header/Footer tab. In there, there are a couple of options for us. We can choose one of the options for header or footer on a dropdown, or click on Custom Header/Custom Footer options:

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For our example, we will use Custom Header and Custom Footer option. When we click on the Custom Header, we will have a new window opened. In there, we will choose to have a header in the Right section, and choose it to be a number of a page:

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We will click OK, then choose to customize the Footer. A window with the same options will appear, and we will choose to center the Footer and show the time:

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When we click OK, we go and click on the Print Preview option in our window:

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Align Header and Footer

We can align the header and footer in terms of their position on a page. To do this, we will repeat the same steps that we made when we created them, and that is to go to Page Layout and find Page Setup. Only this time, we will choose the Margins tab.

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Beforehand, in the first step of the process, we need to choose the option “align with page margins” under the Header/Footer tab which basically means that our header and footer will be aligned relative to the page margins, not to the edge of our page:

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Back on the Margins tab, our goal for aligning the header and footer is to always have them in the same size, and that their values are smaller than the values of the Bottom and Top Margin. Otherwise, the header and footer could overlap the margins. We will increase our numbers just a little bit:

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And will check the header and footer in the Print Preview:

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If we would have gone on and added a header and footer in all positions (left, center, and right) we would see that they are perfectly aligned:

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Tomasz Decker is an Excel specialist, skilled in data analysis and financial modeling.