I have found a ton of scenarios when it is helpful to either edit or completely remove the header and footers that are put on a page when you print from Internet Explorer. It’s sometimes convenient to have the URL and number of pages printed on every page … but not normally. The URL is too long to be displayed half the time anyway. And if whatever you are printing is supposed to be a “printer-friendly version” of the page, or used as client-facing business document then that stuff just looks unprofessional and unpolished.
Remove Headers & Footers:
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Open Internet Explorer
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Click on the little arrow to the right of the printer icon and go to “Page Setup…”
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This will display the screen shown below. Just delete all the text from the boxes in the “Headers and Footers” section, and click OK.
Customize Headers & Footers:
So what does all that stuff shown in the textboxes above mean anyway? I think Microsoft could have definitely done a better job on this, because it is pretty cryptic. But I guess this is the way it has pretty much looked since IE 3 or so, and since it isn’t a section a lot of people go … they haven’t done much improvement on it over the past 10 years. So here is what all of that stuff means:
| Code |
Description |
Example |
| &w |
Window Title |
StuffThatJustWorks.com - How To: Customize or … |
| &u |
URL |
http://www.stuffthatjustworks.com/2008/01/03… |
| &d |
Date (short format) |
2/4/2008 |
| &D |
Date (long format) |
Monday, February 04, 2008 |
| &t |
Time (12 hour format) |
4:48:51 PM |
| &T |
Time (24 hour format) |
16:48:51 PM |
| &p |
Current page # |
1 |
| &P |
Total # of pages |
2 |
| &b |
Separate in new section |
So by default, the header is set to “&w&b Page &p of &P”. This means it will print the Window Title (i.e. whatever is shown in the top title bar of the internet explorer window), and then in a different section (which will be right aligned) it will print the current page number, followed by the text “ of “, followed by the total number of pages.
Say we wanted it to print the current date on the left side of the header instead of the Window Title. All we need to do is replace “&w” with “&D”. We can also choose to divide the header into three sections instead of just two. All you need to do is add the new field you want to display, and a “&b” code along with it. For instance, if we want the date on the left, time in the center, and then current page on the right, we might use “&D&b&t&b&p”. This would display something like this:
You can also just put some static text in that you want to show up on every single page. For instance, maybe instead of the current page number on the right hand side, we would prefer to have “Visit StuffThatJustWorks.com” printed there. To do that we might use ““&D&b&t&bVisit StuffThatJustWorks.com”, which would look like this:
If you ever want to set the header and footer back to what they were by default, just copy and paste these values back in:
- Default header: &w&b Page &p of &P
- Default footer: &u&b&d
For more information on this topic, here is a good reference that goes into more detail: http://www.febooti.com/products/iezoom/print-web/printing-codes-footer-header.html.