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 It's easy enough to select groups of sheets. just click on their tabs while pressing Shift or Ctrl. Shift lets you select the ‘other end’ of the series, either the first or last tab of the series, while Ctrl lets you select individual sheets to build up a non-contiguous group.

Once you've selected all the sheets on which you wish to create footers, you need to select Page Layout on the Office ribbon. Click on the arrow at the bottom-right of the Page Setup area of the ribbon to see the Page Setup dialog box, then click on the box's Header/ Footer tab. Now click on Custom Footer. You'll see a dialog box appear with three areas, for the left, centre and right sections of the footer. You can now enter the report date using &[Date]. Enter the name of the report by typing it, and the page number by using &[Page]. If you want a ‘Page 3 of 5’ type of layout, you'd use &[Page] of &[Pages].

There are buttons that insert each of these footer items in the dialog box; hover over the buttons to see what each does.You can set up Excel so there's a different footer on the first page if you want - on the Header/Footer tab of the Page Setup dialog, click on the button for ‘Different first page’. When you click on Custom Footer, you'll see that there's a tab for the ‘normal’ footer, and another for the first page footer. You can use a similar process to set up different footers (or headers) for odd and even pages.