Starting Page Numbering on Page 2, and Other Ways to Mix Page Styles in a Document

All right. It's the elephant in the room, and it's time to address it.

How do you have no page number on the first page, then have the second page start with the page number 1 in the footer? Or with page number 42, or 623?

(Or how do you have a landscape page in a portrait document?)

Good question. It's a common one. It's actually not more complex than the tax code, but there's some setup you need to do that's a little more complicated than the task at hand. I would like to see a checkbox/field combination somewhere  that would let you specify "For this document, start the page footer on page __ and make the first page number be ___". However, for now, we do it this way.

There are two things to control in this situation:
- Whether there is a page number in the footer--i.e. whether there is any number at all in there, regardless of what it is.
- If there is a page number in the footer, what that page number is.

You control the first with page styles: you set up the page style, say "yes, there's a footer and a page number in it" or "no, no stinkin' page numbers here" and then apply that page style.

You control the second a few different ways. I'm going to show you the most straightforward which is just to create a page break, switch to a different page style, and specify what the page number for that page is.: 1, 42,  623, or anything else.

Let's look at part 1 first.  Page styles are actually a really nice, useful feature.

Part 1: Setting Up Page Styles

Bring up the document you're working with.  Remove any page breaks you've put in between the first and second pages. This sample  document I'm using has some text that clearly goes on a cover page, and then it runs immediately into the content text that should start on page 2.

For any of these images, just click on any of them that are too small for you to read. (They mostly all are, but you might not need to get more detail on all of them.)

Here's my sample document. I want no page number on the first page and page number 1 on the 2nd page.

Choose Format > Styles and Formatting. In that window, click the Page Styles icon at the top.

Right-click in the blank part and choose New. You're going to make the page styles you need.

In the Organizer tab of the page styles window, just name the style  something like Cover Page. This is the one with no footer and no page number.

You actually don't need to do anything else. But just to make sure it's clear when we're applying the styles in this procedure, I'm going to suggest that you  click the Background tab and give it the  light gray background.

Click OK.

Now, right-click in a blank part of the Styles and Formatting window again, and choose New. This time you're creating the other page style, the one for the main body where you're going to have a page number and start it at 1. Call it Main Body or something, in the Organizer tab.

Then click the Footer tab and turn it on by marking the checkbox.

That's all you really need to do, so click OK.

Part 2: Applying a Page Style, Then Switching to Another

Click in the first page of the document, where you want the Cover Page page style. In the Styles and Formatting window, double-click the Cover Page style you created. The style will be applied, as you can tell from the gray background.

The style is applied not only to that page, but to the entire document. That's what's supposed to happen at this point.

Now you're ready to switch. So click to the left of the first word where you want to switch, the first word of the next page usually. Or click to the right of the last word on the current page. Whatever works. Here I've clicked to the left of "Why".

Choose Insert > Manual Break. In the window that appears, just tell it that now you want to switch to the Main Body page style by selecting it in the list.

That second page is also really the first content page of the document, so you'd like it to be page 1. So select the page numbering checkbox and specify 1. (Or any number you want.)

Click OK.

A page break will be inserted where your cursor was, and the new page style you specified, Main Page, will be applied from that page on in the document.

Now, there's one more step. You've already created the footer for that Main Page style, but it's time to put content in it.  I.e., the page number. This is easy. Just scroll to the bottom of the first content page (the second page), type the word page and a space if you want, then choose Insert > Fields > Page Number. The page number will appear. And  you already specified that on this page where the page style switches to MainPage, the page numbering should restart at 1.  So it restarts at 1. (If you had specified page number 42 earlier, this number would be 42.)

That's All There Is To It

Just create the styles you want, apply the first style, then just switch page styles the way we did in this example.

Tips for Landscape and Portrait in the Same Document

To have a landscape page in a portrait document, just create a page style and select the Landscape option of the Page tab. So in this example, you could create a third page style, call it Landscape or Horizontal. Switch to it the way we did here with the manual break, but just don't change the page number.

Tips for Automatic Switching From One Page Style to Another

If you want to automatically switch from one page style to another, you have two options.

In the page style definition window, click the Organizer tab and find the Next Style list. You'll still need to insert manual page breaks sometimes but you won't have to switch styles as we did earlier.

In the paragraph style definition window, click the Text Flow tab and find the section in the middle dealing with creating a page break with a particular page style on the next page.

Or try using all three approaches together.

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Comments

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi all,

Sorry for missing the big discussion -- my email notification re comments is broken and I'm not sure when it's going to be fixed.

Re Carlos's question about numbering, choose Insert > Fields > Page Number and put it in the header or footer. Then for the page style for that header or footer, go Format > Page, Page tag, and in the Format list select the type of numbering you want.

Frank, great tip on the Tools > Options window! That's great, hadn't really noticed it.

I usually don't use the pre-created page styles so haven't encountered this as much. I just did a bunch of tests and for me, with Mirrored instead of Right/Left, the blank thing didn't happen.

Solveig

[Chris]

Thanks

[Thomas Neuhaus]

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem as Carlos E. F. Roland. I have two different page styles, one numbered with Roman numbers, one with Arabic.
In the TOC I also want it distinguished in Roman and Arabic numbers.
I.e. like that:

Abstract..........I
Definitions.......II
Introduction......1

I don't know what to try else anymore.

Thanks in advance,

Thomas

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Thomas,

To control the page number type for a page style, modify the page style and in the Page tab, select the numbering type using the Format dropdown list. Also be sure that when you inserted the page number in the footer, that you just did it as Insert > Fields > Page Number so that it will reflect the current page style. Double-click the page number field in the footer to check. If in the window that appears, in the far right column, As Page Style is highlighted, that's correct. (You could change the page number style here but it's better to control it through the page style definition.)

This should correctly show up in the TOC.

Solveig

[Thomas Neuhaus]

Thanks a lot for your immediate and detailed answer.
Now even me could do it the right way ;-)

Regards,

Thomas

[Francis Manas]

Hi, for those getting the blank pages, I finally figured out, how to properly get rid of the blank pages

When you create a new page style, put the next type of style on the 'Next Style' column. ie:
create a TOC page style with the next style pointing to your 'Body' style. Then create a Cover Page page style then point next style to the TOC page style. Instead of inserting a page break after the Cover Page, just insert the necessary row spaces to go to the next page. The next page will be the TOC style, insert spaces until the next page and you are now in your 'Body' page style.

Now if I can just reset the total page count.

Thanks for the tips.

Francis

[Tim]

Thanks very much! Great tip! After struggling with the help docs for a while I couldn't find an answer to this that worked. But your tut has worked great!

[A.K.]

I found it to be very helpful, thanks a lot.
But I have a strange problem: I can not (with OO 2.1.06) to set arbitrary page numbers starting from the very first page.
It used to (with previous versions of OO) worked, and it was very simple.
If I wanted to start my document form the page 47, I simply clicked on the first paragraph of the document, chose "Edit Paragraph Style", went to "Text Flow",
in the sectuion "Breaks", I activated "Insert" and "With Page Style" and set page number to 47. I didn't even change the page style (it remained to be Default).
After that, I pressed Ok, and only had to turn on Footer (Menu: Insert), and then insert page numbers Menu: Insert-Fields-Page Numbers).
(it is in fact exactly the same procedure described in OpenOffice help section "Starting with a defined page number" )
This procedure worked with the latest OO (state: Dec.2006), but diesn't work now.

Now, if I do that, every single patagraph is displayed on the separate page.
Does anyone know what happened?

The solution described here is great, but it doesn't allow to see the page number on the first page of the document *too*!
many thanks in advance.
A.K.

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi AK,

The feature works the same way. It's just that I think before you choose Format > Paragraph, and now you are modifying the paragraph style itself, Format > Styles and Formatting, selecting the paragraph style and choosing Edit. Alternately you might be somehow applying the changes you're making to every paragraph rather than just one paragraph.

I just did it in 2.1 and it worked correctly.

Just click to the left of the first paragraph on the page, choose Format > Paragraph, and make the changes in the Text Flow tab. That should work.

Solveig

[Bill Knippenberg]

First, I don't know what a URL is.
Background and problem: I have a multi page document, cover page, intro pages,TOC, body, and appendix. The intro and TOC pages are numbered i, ii etc. The pages in the body are marked 1,2,... . I want the pages in the appendix to read A-1, A-2 etc.. Question 1: Using Word's customized method of changing styles, I have been able to make the first page of the appendix A-1 but the second page will not go to A-2. Why not??
Question 2: When I try to force A-2 into the second page footer in the appendix the page numbers in the rest of the document change correspondingly and in sequenceA-3,A-4... . I do I get the second and subsequent pages to change numbers in the footer in the appendix without changing numbers in the body of the document?

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Bill,

For the appendix, you should be able to just create a new page style, Appendix or whatever. Turn on the footer when you define the style, in the Footer tab of the page style window, or by choosing Insert > Footer > pagestylename.

Add the page number to the appendix footer by choosing Insert > Fields > Page Number and then to the left of the page number, type A-

After you've done that, be sure to save the document so that the content of the page footer will be saved with the page style.

To switch from your normal content page style to the appendix page style, just use the standard approach. Click to the left of the heading for your appendix and choose Insert > Manual Break, select the Appendix page style in the dropdown list of the window that appears, and reset the page number to 1.

You could also use other approaches described in this post to switch page styles and change the page number.

[Uli]

Dear Solveig
I have page numbers in arabic starting from 1 for each new chapter. But the page numbers are english in TOC. Is there any way to change them into arabic numerals (whith chapter numbers)?

Best Regards
Uli

[Solveig Haugland]

Hmmm...the TOC should be correctly reflecting the numbers in the footers. Refresh the TOC (right-click on the TOC and choose Update) to see if that helps.

Solveig

[Michael B]

AH !!!

To the guy that said he gets a BLANK PAGE after his title page. I had this problem too, what a pain. The fix follows, not the one that was suggested by someone else.

Suppressing printout of empty pages
If two even or two odd pages directly follow each other in your document, Writer will insert an empty page by default. You can suppress those automatically generated empty pages from printing and from exporting to PDF.
1.Choose Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org Writer - Print.
2.Remove the check mark from Print automatically inserted blank pages.

[Matthew Ford]

Changing page numbers and offsets worked will for me... but when I use PageCount I still get all the pages not just the count for this Page Style.
I have a title page i and 9 normal page but the page count on the normal pages shows Page 3 of 10

[Tim]

Thanks. Your instructions worked great!!!!

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Tim,

Glad it worked! That is definitely one procedure that needs an Easy Button, though.

Solveig

[Ian]

Bless you for posting this.

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Ian,

With every release I keep hoping that there'll be a nice simple "suppress first page header and footer" checkbox, but nt so far. :(

Solveig

[Mark]

Rather than manually inserting a page break, click the cursor at the beginning of the text of the section you want to start a new page number and go to Format|Paragraph|Text Flow|Breaks, select Insert and With Page Style, and select what page number to start with. This gets rid of blank page and gives you the page number you want.

[Murdoc Addams]

Just wanted to also thank you for this advice, it helped me a lot! Even though it's a year and a half later, Google still pulled it up first for me. Now my book will be much more professional looking (now that I've figured out how to alternate where the page numbers appear on left and right pages too).

Thanks!

[Raymond]

I used this procedure and I ended up with a field "Page numbers" in the footer on all pages except the first one.

I am unable to find a numbering style in the format box.

Raymond

[Raymond]

I used this procedure and I ended up with a field "Page numbers" in the footer on all pages except the first one.

I am unable to find a numbering style in the format box.

Raymond

[Ari]

Thanks, exactly what I needed. It shouldn't be this difficult though.

[Solveig]

Exactly. I'm really hoping that in the next major rev (or minor) that there will be a "no page number on first page" checkbox, at the very least.

Solveig