I’ve been trying to create some building blocks for a new template I’m building. One of the things I needed to do is be able to swap footers. I’ve tried a couple of methods which I’ll blog about later, but the method leading to this blog post was deciding to use the out-of-the-box Footer Quick Part functionality.

The first thing I did was simply create a custom footer, select all the text and then save it to the Quick Parts Gallery. I created a new document and inserted my customer footer from the Gallery. Hey, it did exactly as I expected it to do. Since the overarching functionality I need is to be able to swap footers, I selected another footer from the Footer Gallery.

What happened is it just added the content of the other footer to my custom footer already at the bottom of the page. Definitely not what I expected. So, I delete the footer from my page and insert one directly from the Footer Gallery. Then I pick another footer from the Footer Gallery. Sure enough, when swapping between different footers from the Footer Gallery, they replace each other.

So, if you want to actually create a custom footer, be sure to save it to the actual Footer Gallery. Apparently Word is doing some special processing when inserting items from this gallery, and presumably some of the others, that it doesn’t do with other Building Blocks.