Thursday, February 24, 2011

How to skip page number for a cover page in Word

Running
- Mac OSX 10.6.6 (Snow Leopard)
- Microsoft Word 2008 v12.2.8

What we're trying to do
- Have a cover page.
- Add page numbering in the footer, starting at the second page.
- Have the first page number (on 2nd page) start at 1.

How to do it
- Go to Format > Document (for Mac) or File > Page Setup (for PC) and go to the Layout tab.
- Check the box under Headers and Footers that says "different first page" and click OK.
- Put in some placeholder text for your cover page and either a page break or a bunch of returns, so the next page appears.
- Double-click on the footer area of the 2nd page to edit the footer.
- Hit Ctrl-F9 (for PC) or Cmd-F9 (for desktop Mac) or Cmd-Fn-F9 (for MacBook). This should insert a gray pair of curly braces with a space in between. These are very magical curly braces. If you just type the curly brace characters { }, it won't work.
- Put your cursor in between curly braces and type an equal sign (=).
- Then hit the command keys again to insert another pair of curly braces after the equal sign.
- Put your cursor in between the inner curly braces and type the word PAGE.
- Now move your cursor between the two right curly braces (}) and type - 1.
- By this point, you should see this: {={PAGE}-1}. Remember, you can't just type the curly braces. They should show up when you hit that F9 combination.
- Now let's test it out. Go to File > Print Preview, and take a look. You should see nothing on the cover page's footer and "1" on the second page's footer.

Commentary
You can also add the number of pages in a similar way (i.e. "Page 1 of 5"). After completing the above, add " of {={NUMPAGES}-1}".

In Word 2007 and later, you can also choose to add a template cover page. For Mac, Go to View > Elements Gallery > Cover Pages. However, if you add page numbering to this, it will start the 2nd page with "2" instead of "1".

The following Microsoft help articles may also be helpful:
Field codes: = (Formula) field
Remove the page number from the first page