About Dawn Douglas Expertise I can answer most questions about Microsoft Publisher.
Experience I have been using Microsoft Publisher for 11 years. I started with Adobe InDesign and Pagemaker. I like Microsoft Publisher for it's ease of use.
Education/Credentials I am self taught in Microsoft Publisher. I learned by doing.
Question Good day Dawn. I have an 11 x 8.5 project where each page is split into two text box areas so that I can print a double-sided e-book. On the right-hand side of the page, I want to print the chapter/section title and page number, where on the left-hand side I want to print the book title along with page number.
I think I have everything in order in my Master page except for the section/chapter title appearing in the header. I thought it would be as simple as Insert > Field but I cannot find any such option. After searching high and low for over an hour in both MS Help and the Web I decided to ask an expert.
Maybe it is right in front of me but your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks -
Michael
Answer Hi Michael,
Good day to you as well. Hmmmm. I understand what you're trying to do. A it's really quite simple, if you were working in Microsoft Word, that is. I'm going to assume that you used the header/footer to insert your "title/page number." That works because the title of your document is not going to change and Microsoft Publisher will automatically paginate when using the # command. But the chapter section and section title will change throughout the document and Microsoft publisher doesn't have a command per se that will do that. You can do it, but it's a bit complicated.
I can only think of two ways to do it. The easy way would be just to insert a text box and type in the various chapters and heading where you want them to appear. The other way would be to use a mail merge function.
You can use the mail merge function to create the chapter and section heading in an excel document that will merge into your publisher document based on your text field. You would not do this as a header or on the master page. This would be a text area in your document obtaining information from a data source.
Here's how you would do it.
Open an excel document. In Row 1 type your headings. So row 1 column A would be "Chapter"; Row 1 Column B would be "Section". Since you probably have multiple chapters and sections for each different chapter and section attach a letter to it. For example row 1 column C would say "ChapterA", row 1 column D would say "SectionB" etc...these are going to be your text field headings.
In Row 2 Column A type "Chapter 1" and in Row 2 Column B type "Section 1" and so forth. This is the text that's going to appear in your Publisher document. Delete the additional pages of the work book and save the excel spreadsheet to a your desktop or a place where you can find it.
Open your publisher document go tools> mail and catalog merge> mail and catalog wizard. In the wizard Step 1 Select Mail merge. Step 2 select data source select "use an existing list" and select "browse". find the excel speadsheet document you created. Step 3 create your publication. What you want to do is create your text box where you want the chapter and section to appear and then select the heading field where the information is located. Once you have all your chapter and section heading inserted complete the merge.
