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

[Stephen]

Well the last comment was posted > 13 months ago and I'm still having a lot of the same issues posted here. I have a seperate page style for my cover sheet and I don't have a footer. I insert a page break and enable the option to start at page 1 (new page style as well). In my next section I insert the footer and put in the page number and number of pages. This looks good so far, except when I get to the end of the doc, it says this is page 16 of 18... But I'm on the last page! It turns out it is counting the blank page it inserts in the beginning (Why does it insert this? I have the same content checked left/right as suggested.) And it is counting my cover sheet... If I wanted it to count my cover sheet, I would have left the next page in the new section labeled 2. The blank page is frustrating... I can't get rid of it, but have figured out how to not make it not print via a suggestion above. Any suggestion to solve my "number of pages issue"?

[Stephen]

OOPS,
Sorry about the 13 months comment... Didn't see the "Next" Link... :(

[EZ]

Thank you - great help!

[EZ]

Thank you - great help!

[Margie]

Thanks! This has been very helpful. :D

[Thorin N. Tatge]

After half an hour of frustration, I was happy to discover the option you described, in the Tools|Options window, to suppress automatically printed blank pages. It works...but the annoying thing now is that in the Print Preview, the page that was formerly blank is now a copy of the following page. It made me afraid that it was going to print twice. It looks like Open Office's Print Preview viewer simply isn't equipped to handle odd-numbered pages on the right or even-numbered pages on the left. Which is ever stranger given that even-on-left/odd-on-right is the way actual books are usually printed.

[John]

Just wanted to say a quick thanks to Frank (above) I've been banging my head on my desk for ages trying to remove the blank page from PDF files!

Thanks!

[sabna]

I have an open office document with page number starts in 3rd page.While creating the TOC ,the page number comes as 3.I would like to know how can I create a TOC with page number starts at 1.

[grrrr]

you people are so wrong, none of this helped...

[fourmis]

You saved my life !!!
Thanks a lot.

[Rhea]

Hello.

I found difficulties in setting up the headers. When I set the header once, it appears on the all pages while I just want the header to be shown only on the first page.
How to make the header only shown on the first page and no header on the other pages?
Your response will be very helpful for me. Thanks a lot before.

Best Regards,

Rhea

[Manpreet]

Thanks for the tutorial. It was very helpful. Also it's very well written - short and to the point.

[wag-a-muffin]

O.k., I have a book. It's 122 pages. And I was starting another book and I couldn't figure out how to add the page numbers. Somehow I printed the words "page numbers" in the upper right hand corner (in the header) and now my book, instead of being numbered also says "page numbers" on all of it's 122 pages.
I am so frustrated.

[wag-a-muffin]

I am going to KILL MYSELF!!! Why can't I just insert page numbers onto my writing? Why is it so difficult?

Geesh!

[Jason Cole]

Wow -- You just saved my bacon.. thank you! Extremely helpful post and great instructions.

[Tony]

or you could just set the offset of the pagenumber field to -1 :)

[mark]

Cheers to Frank and Barabas, bth solutions worked nicely - this has been a thorn in my side for a while now :)

[JD]

Thank you so much, was in desperate need of numbered pages without numbering the cover page!

[Juddy]

Easier way for 3.0:

- select page number in header or footer

- right-click, select 'Fields'

- Set offset to '-1', to begin numbering on page 2

[David]

What version of OpenOffice will give a simple option, start page numbering from page X? This works, but it is unnecessarily complicated.

[Solveig]

Hi David,

For now you just have to use the pagination extension. It's a very nice feature, though.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2008/03/you-want-this-e.html

[JR]

here is what i think about so many of the info sharers on the net and elewhere. they play with words like they play with peoples minds. i get insultingly appalled when most info givers take the long road right after they tell you they got "the easy way out of the woods" tip. then you end up spending an hour saying wt_? i learned a long time ago "to make it simple and get to the point now not an hour from now".
sorry but i cannot pat someone on the back who is still in the "hunter/gatherer" era when all they've done is complicate matters even worse. my only advice is "make it simple s____d."

[peeaitch]

This needs updating for OO3 as (for instance) there's no "Footer" tab in the styles dialogue

[Robbo]

Thanks. Was a very mysterious process up until now.

[Chris]

thankyou SO MUCH xxxxxxxx

[burbunster]

Thanks for the post - I've ended up with an amazing page break, which gives me one blank page and fucks up the whole document

[Neil]

Excellent tutorial, THANKS! :D

[Greg]

Thanks! This worked fine for me in OpenOffice.org calc v 3.1.1. Previously, I had set the page formats for each page individually, and the page numbering got reset to 1 for some pages (but not all... weird!), so when I did a print preview, the numbering came out wrong. But I just now created a new page style per your instructions and quickly and easily applied it to all pages. Now the numbering is correct and I can print my spreadsheet!

Again, thanks!

Greg

[Roger]

Hi!

No one has written in this thread for a long time, but I'm desperately trying to get page numbering working. I found this thread but no one seem to have the same problem I have.

I want to have one first page without page number, then a table of content(no page number), then the main text with page numbers and at last the appendix without page numbers. I have a version where it looks ok with the page numbers, but even if there are no page numbers on the appendix pages, the table of content shows page numbers for appendix!!!!

It is ridiculous that page numbering of a document is this difficult year 2010.

Please help if you know how!

[Solveig]

Hi Roger,

You need to have four different page styles; there are four preexisting ones or you can make your own.

Yes, the display of page numbers for the appendix is separate from whether the system knows them or not. This provides power and flexibility.

Here's what to do. It's not the only way.

- Get all the content together including inserting the TOC.
- Create the page styles. Just choose Format > Styles and Formatting, click the Page Styles icon at the top, right-click in a blank area of the styles list, and choose New. Name them MyFirstPage, MyTOC, MyMain, and MyAppendix. Turn on the footer for the ones you want page numbers for.
- Go to the first page. Double-click the MyFirstPage page style.
- Go to the end of the first page or at least to the left of the first line of the TOC heading. Choose Insert > Manual Break. Select Page Break and in the list of styles select MyTOC. If you want to restart the page numbering at 1 select that checkbox too.
- Go to the end of the TOC and choose Insert > Manual Break. Select Page Break and in the list of styles select MyMain. If you want to restart the page numbering at 1 select that checkbox too.
- Go to the end of the main content and choose Insert > Manual Break. Select Page Break and in the list of styles select MyAppendix.

Now go back to the part of the document (TOC, main content?) where you want page numbers. Click in the footer and choose Insert > Fields > Page Number, for the TOC, then go to the main content and do the same thing.

Now right-click on the TOC and choose Edit TOC. In the main window there's a checkbox to protect from edits. Unmark that. Click OK.

Update the TOC again (right click and Update TOC) to be sure it's right.

Now just delete the part of the TOC that has page numbers for the appendix, if you don't want them. There's another way but there's some setup to do for it.(It has to do with excluding certain chapters or headings.)

There are also ways to apply the page breaks and page styles automatically, but you need to create special paragraph styles to associate with them.

Solveig

[nick]

thank you so much much, can't believe they haven't simplified this by now