Microsoft Word offers a lot of options and functions that allow us to format our text documents to personalize them or give them a more professional touch. In large documents, it is very helpful to make an index or create an outline in Word to organize our content, but also, something quite useful is also to list all the pages. Therefore, we will show below How to Insert Page Numbers in Word Document.
It is possible that many users have done this on more than one occasion, however, this simple tutorial is aimed at those more inexperienced users who want to list pages in Word and do not know how to do it, or even for those who despite having something more experience, they have found that they need to number the pages in a somewhat peculiar way.
Steps to follow: How to Insert Page Numbers in Word?
Table of Contents
To add page numbers to a Word document, the first thing we have to do is open the document in the Office tool and then go to the Insert menu option. Once selected, we look for the Page number option, which can be found in the Header and Footer section, and we click on it. This will display a menu with the options Top of page, End of page, Page margins, Current position, Page number format, and Remove page numbers.
The first option allows us to list the Word page by adding the page number in different formats at the top of each page of the document, the second does the same but in this case adds the page numbering at the bottom of each one of them, while the Page margins option allows you to list pages in Word by adding the page numbers in the lateral margins of the document in different formats.
Finally, what the Current position option does is add the page number right where we have the cursor, while the Page number format and Remove page numbers options do exactly what they say, offer different options and settings to give the format that we want to the page numbers or delete them if we have already added them previously.
Special Cases: How to Insert Page Numbers in Word
On certain occasions, when numbering pages in Word we may not want the page numbers that appear in the header or footer to be the same as the actual page numbers in the document. In this case, there are three situations that can occur, that we do not want the title page to appear numbered but that it is counted and the second page is page 2, that on the first page we have a title and on the second an index and that we want to start listing pages in Word from the third page but that counts as page 1 or that we want to start listing pages in Word from a specific number since our document may be the continuation of another.
Remove page number from the first page
If what we want is to remove the page number from the first page, perhaps because it is where we have the title and we don’t want it to appear, but the next page we want to be number 2, then what we have to do is remove the number of the page of the first page. In that case, the first thing we have to do is go to the Insert option in Word, click on Header or Footer, and then on Edit Header or Edit Footer.
Next, within the Design> Options tab, we select the Different first-page box. This will make in the header or footer area, we will see a label on the first page with the First Page Header option. Therefore, all we have to do is select the page number to select it and click Delete.
Start page numbering later in the document
In the case that we want to start numbering pages in Word from one page later in our document, what we have to do is go to the page where we want the numbering to start and then insert a section break. To do this, we click on the menu option Format> Page setup> Breaks> Next page and then double-click on the header or footer area of the first page where we want the page numbers to appear.
This will open the Design tab in Header and Footer Tools and we have to click Link to the previous one to deactivate and unlink the header or footer in the previous section, which are the previous pages in which we do not want enumeration.
Now, we are going to Insert> Page number and select the Page number format option. There, we mark the option Start in, we write a one to indicate that we want to start the pagination at that point from 1, since by default Word will apply for the real page number, and we click OK.
The only thing left is to remove the page numbers from the previous section. To do this, just select any page number in that section and click Delete. This will remove all page numbers from that section. In this way, we will be able to number pages in Word starting with page 1 later in the document.
Start page numbering with a number other than 1
To list pages in Word and start at a number other than 1, what we will do is double click on the header or footer area and from the Design tab we choose the Page Number option, we select the location of the numbers and the Format. Now, we click on Page number> Page number format, and in Page numbering we select the option Start at and write the number with which we want to start numbering pages in Word.
Problems with page numbering in Word
In addition to the special cases that we just discussed page numbering in a Word document, the truth is that on certain occasions we can find that the numbering is not relative as we create our document. One of the main or most common problems is that after a section the numbering is done again from the beginning. That is, everything is going well in our document, the numbering is correlative but when adding a new section in the document the numbering starts again from page one.
In this sense, we must take into account that the page number is a property of the Word sections, therefore, we must tell the Office tool that the numbering continues with that of the previous section if we want to, although it can It may be that on certain occasions we want each section to be numbered independently of the rest, which we can also do.
To solve the problem and make the page numbering correlative throughout the entire document regardless of the sections it has, what we have to do is:
- select the footer where the page numbering starts again. Which will coincide with the beginning of a new section?
- check the section and the page number.
- right-click on the page number and enter the Page number format option.
- This will open a new window in which we must check the Page Numbering section.
- Normally, the option Start at 1 is marked by default, while the option we must select is Continue from the previous section.
- We mark this option and click on OK to save the changes.
Now we can go back to the document and check how the section has been numbered from the last page number of the previous section and the page counter at 1 no longer starts again.
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