Page numbering happens in the headers or footer of the document, making use of section breaks to indicate where page numbering will and will not be present. This guide will focus on adding page numbers from the beginning but will cover their usage afterwards.
Adding Page numbers
On the Insert tab, click the pages number icon, then select where you would like the page number to feature on the page:
Skipping the first page
This will start page numbering from the first page of the document, if you wish to ignore the very first page you will need to access the header/footer menu. If you have just added page numbers then you will automatically be in the header/footer menu. If you have left this area and need to return the easiest way to do so is from the Insert menu, select the header or footer options and at the bottom of this menu you can select 'edit header/footer':
Once in the header and footer menu you will want to select 'different first page':
However, this can only be used to remove page numbering for the first page of a document as if you need to remove numbering from more pages you will need to use section breaks.
Ignoring page numbering on certain sections
To ignore page numbering beyond the first page we will need to make use of section breaks to break the document into sections, we can then enable or disable page numbering per section.
- Section breaks can be added to a document from the layout tab:
- After adding in a section break, any page after the section break will be a new section. You can enter the header/footer menu to see which pages are in which sections:
- By default, each section's header/footer is attached to the previous section, this is marked by the 'same as previous' tag you can see on the right-hand header/footer of the previous image. To disable this, click into the header or footer you wish to unlink, in the ribbon menu uncheck the box that says 'same as previous':
- Once this section's header/footer has been unlinked from the previous we are able to have a different header/footer to the previous section, this means that if you have page numbering, we can apply it in this section now without it automatically being added to the pages beforehand.
- If you added page numbers before this step, delete them first and add them again to the section. If the number starts at anything beyond "page 1" you'll need to follow the final step. In the page number menu, access the 'format page numbers' button. At the bottom of this menu you will find the option to select "start at: " which can be used instead of "continue from previous section", change this value to either 0 or 1 depending on what number you want your first page to be:
