Merry Christmas! An Easier Way to Start Page Numbering at 1 on the Second Page

Note: Upon further testing, this works fine as described but the table of contents does not reflect the offset correctly. Sorry!

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I was answering comments on this blog about starting page numbering on page 2, when I mentioned the page number offset, and how it doesn't work.

And I thought, well, I haven't tested this in OpenOffice.org 2.1 yet.

Hmmm......

And then I grinned broadly as it worked exactly the way it used to.  BUT that's OK because how it functions is perfect for when you don't want a page number on page 1, and you want the second page to be page 1. (Or the third page to be page 1, etc.)

This means that if you want, and if it suits your document, you can totally skip the whole big thing with page styles simply by inserting the page number field in your footer as usual, then double-clicking the page field and typing a negative page offset.

Here's the poop.

What the Page Offset Is

When you insert a page number in a header or footer (or in your page content), you get a page number, of course. This is a FIELD, which means it's not just text, it's got intelligence built into it. The gray shading indicates it's a field.

You can double-click the page number and you get this window.

The Offset fields at the bottom right is what we're interested in here. Type in 4 and your first page number will be 5; type in -2 and your first page number will be -3.

Seems like this could be useful, yes? Well, kind of. Read on.

The Way It Works That Doesn't Do You Any Good, and the Reason I Hadn't Talked About the Offset Before

If you type 4 in the Offset field, then the first page number to appear will be 5. (It would normally be 1, so an offset of 4, 1+4, is 5.)

Here's what that looks like in the window.

Here's the effect on the first page in the document.

Here's the effect on another page in the document. So far so good.

But here's the effect on one of the last four pages  (4 is the offset) in the document. No freakin' page number at all. There's gray but nothing will actually print.

So: when you type in a positive offset, where x = your offset number, the last x pages of the document don't have a page number.

The Way It Works That Is Useful For You, and Exactly How You Can Use This for Documents With Pages You Don't Want Numbered

Positive offset isn't that usefull, but negative offset is verra nice

Let's say you have a cover page, and your content is the second page. You want no page number on the cover page and you want "1" to appear in the footer of the second page.

So you want 1 of your pages to have no page number in the footer. Your offset is therefore -1.

Here's what you do.

Insert the page field number as usual. (To add the footer, choose Insert > Footer > Default. Click in the footer text box that appears and choose Insert > Fields > Page Number.)

Double-click the inserted page number.

In the fields window, type -1 in the Offset field.

And here's the result on your first page. Look at that! It's gray,  so that means nothing will print! Which is exactly what you want!

And here's what the first page of content looks like, i.e. the second page of your document. Again, this is exactly what you want -- the number 1.

And since the numbers disappeared at the beginning of the document, not at the end, you get the correct page numbers all the way to the end of your document.

This is great. Much easier than page styles; my apologies for not bringing it to everyone's attention earlier.

If you want the page number 1 to appear on your second page, use the offset -1.
If you want the page number 1 to appear on your third page, use the offset -2.

And so on.

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Comments

[Edward Ocampo-Gooding]

This, and getting word processors to not print the first page's number is consistently their most annoying aspects. It drives me nuts, especially because by the time I have to do this, it's 2:30am the day that this paper's due, and fussing with OO or Word is a vehemently crappy thing to do.

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Edward! Yeah,I'm seriously looking forward to a checkbox "don't print on first page" or something easier.

[Dan]

What i still have not found any cure for is how to get the toatal number of pages to also be offset with -1
ie if you have page X of Y
where Y is the total number of pages
and start at -1 so that the cover page is not counted you will arrive at Y-1 on the last page....it looks a bit bad having
page 12 of 13 in a document.
i tried with a bookmark on the last pages number but it appears that the calculation -1 happens after the information is feed to bookmark function this means that the number that the bokmark see is in the example above 13...not the number that i want. current fix is to take the last but one page.

[Dan]

Correction to the above on how the get the total page number to correspond in oo2.1
position the cursor where you want the number
select table>formula
write
PAGE-1

[JZA]

The way to achieve this is defined on the Page breaks. Where you insert a page break and you have different styles of pages you can asign the next page as a specified Style and specified page.

Let say you have your cover page, then your index and then the content and you want the content to start with #1.

So when you finish Index. You put Insert > Page Break choose a page style and check on Start Page as and put #1.

After you put OK then you can have #3 start at #1.

[Mike Calder]

HOWTO: Do page number offsets properly.

I wanted to create several book segments as separate OO files. That means having page numbers starting from a number greater than 1, but having the numbers appear on all pages, unlike the way things happen with the page number "offset" option.

As noted above, "offset" in the Page Number footer dialog isn't it. It took me hours to find out how to do it, which is thusly:

Set up your footer, type "Page" if you want that, then go to the "Insert - Fields" dialogue, but here select "Other".

Select the "Variables" tab. From that set of options, select "Set page variable" and choose "on" - you'll now see the "Offset" box is enabled. This is the *real* offset! So here you enter the number you want added to the page numbers, and press the "Insert" button.

You may notice that all that gets inserted is a little grey oblong - that's because we haven't asked for anything to be displayed yet, believe it or not.

Now select the "Show page variable" option in the "Variables" tab (and you'll probably want to choose "Arabic (1 2 3)", and press "Insert".

Hey presto! You now have the page numbers set to pn + the number of your choice, and it will appear on *all* pages of your document!

If you're doing different layout for right and left pages (like me) then you'll need to do this a second time for the other page layout, but the second time just do the "Show variable" step.

[someone]

this will break your automatically generated index as it does not have a offset.

[domce]

Struggled with offset numbers myself, but auto generated page indexes weren't considering the negative offset. Then I found a solution!
I clicked on Help in the 'Edit Fields: Document' dialog window.:)

The solution is...
1.Click into the first paragraph of your document.
2.Choose Format - Paragraph - Text flow.
3.In the Breaks area, enable Insert. Enable With Page Style just to be able to set the new Page number. Click OK.

That's it :)

[Mary H.]

Thanks for the tip.