Page numbers

In the case of longer written work (e.g. a report, research or practical work, Personal Project), the pages of the work must be numbered. In the case of a research paper, the title page and the author’s declaration page are not numbered, but their numbers count towards the number of pages of the paper. When numbering pages, the MS Word page numbering tool must be used, and there are two different ways of doing this, depending on whether the numbering is to start on the second page or a subsequent page. Correct numbering is necessary to create a table of contents and, if necessary, to remove the page numbers from the ‘Annexes’ but leave them in the table of contents.

The HEADER AND FOOTER and LAYOUT menus must be used to number pages.

Numbering pages from the second page

• Scroll to the bottom of the page and double-click.
• The Header and Footer menu opens.
• Click on the “Page number” button (on the left side of the page).
• To select the location of the page number, click Bottom of Page and the location in the middle of the page.
• To remove the page number from the first (title) page, tick the box Different first page in the same menu.

Numbering pages from the 3rd page and onward

If you need to start numbering from the third or subsequent page, you should divide the written work into sections so that only some numbers can be removed. To do this, the following steps need to be followed:

• Move the cursor to the page that should become the first numbered page.
• Go to the Layout menu and click the box next to the Breaks button.
• Select Section Break – Next page. This will separate your document into different sections. The header and footer will contain Section 1 and Section 2. You can see these characters by double-clicking in the header or footer.
• Next, you need to separate the first and second sections. To do this, double-click at the bottom of the page. The Header and Footer menu opens. Find the Link to previous button and uncheck it.
• Enter the page numbers, as usual.
• Delete the page numbers you don’t need (from section 1). Since the document sections are separated, the numbers in section 2 will remain.

NB! You can also use the same method to remove page numbers from the appendices at the end of your work.

GOOD TO KNOW!
If the page number in the footer is not what you want, right-click on the page number and select Format page numbers. From there, you can make two choices:

• Continue from the previous section – take the deleted page numbers into account and continues from there.
• Start at – lets you choose the number from which the page starts.

This method can only be used in MS Word. The MS Word Online version does not have the possibility to divide pages into sections and to start numbering from page 3 onwards; only the “different first page” option is available.