Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Office 365. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Creating Long Page Footers.
Carolyn wonders if it is possible to create a footer that is more than 255 characters and goes from left to right across the entire page, similar to what can be done in Word.
The short answer is that there is no way to do this. In practice, getting the footer to go all the way across the page is not that difficult; what is difficult is getting it to contain more than 255 characters. This limit seems hard-coded into Excel. There are a few things you can try to work around the limitation, however.
First, you could simply "fake" a footer by putting what you want into cells that you then copy to the bottom of each page. This isn't terribly user-friendly, as moving and inserting rows can play havoc with where those "footer cells" are actually printed.
Another idea is to create your footer content using any cells in your worksheet, copy the cells to the Clipboard, and then paste them into your favorite image editing program as a picture. There you can size the picture to your liking and make any other changes necessary. Make sure you save the picture as a JPG file. Back in Excel you can create your custom footer by inserting that saved picture into any part of the footer.
Finally, you can use the old "two pass" technique with your printer. Create your footer in Word, as desired. Print a bunch of pages that consist of only the footer, place those pages back into your printer's paper tray, and then print your Excel worksheet. All you need to do is make sure that the bottom margin is set properly in Excel so that there is enough space left for the footer you printed from Word.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11914) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Creating Long Page Footers.
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2020-01-10 08:21:02
Jens Holme Bjørneboe
I use creation of pictures in Excel. Not for footers but for floating information that will not get erased when filtering or erasing rows.
Using pictures as footers also opens up for using a table from Word, which is much easier to cotrol and create something innovative.
To this topic I would like to ask if a merge function could be used, where Excel content could be embedded into a Word document in the merge function?
2020-01-10 04:15:13
Chris
I used a variation of the "Fake" technique on a calendar workbook I created; it consisted of a dashboard on sheet 1, where I entered control information and a sheet for each month. The cell on the left side at the bottom of each month's page referred to a named cell on sheet 1, which contained text; a cell centre bottom referred to another cell on the dashboard which contained a formula for the filename; finally, a cell right bottom a formula which generated month and year for that sheet.
2017-02-10 14:29:44
Michaela Reyes-Holmes
This link was wonderful, however I want to be able to do this for the Left, and Right side of the Footer, however when I try to do both only one works. Can anyone give me some advice?
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Office 365. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: 
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