I’m not sure whether to post this in the Word or Adobe Acrobat forum, but I’ll start here.

I have a Word document that’s about 20 pages long, with four cover pages placed throughout. I don’t want page numbers on these cover pages, but I’m running into issues with the pagination. It’s getting frustrating, and I’m unsure how to fix it. A colleague suggested that I remove the page numbers from Word altogether and add them after converting the document to PDF. However, I also need to create a Table of Contents, which, as far as I know, can only be generated in Word.

Does anyone have advice on how to address this? Unfortunately, I can’t attach the document since it’s confidential, but I hope I’ve explained the issue clearly enough for some suggestions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
TIA,
Karen

A new-page or odd-page section break before each "Cover Page."

Do you want page numbering to restart after each cover page?

Once you have the section break, edit a header or footer in each section and mark it to have a "different first page." Delete any page number from your Cover Page.

• Page Numbers in Word 2007-2024 (365)
• Header/Footer Settings Recap

Hi Charles,

Thank you for your help.

I wish that Microsoft would improve on the section break/page number features. They can be very confusing.

Do you want page numbering to restart after each cover page?
Yes

Thank you,
Karen

To have page numbering restart in each section, use the format page numbers dialog in each section to begin numbering at 0.

• This assumes that you want to have the first page after the cover page be numbered 1.
• This assumes that the first cover page was not generated by Word's Insert Cover Page function. (If it was, the Cover page is already set as 0 for the first section.)

Resource: Cover Page Anomalies

Hello,

I’m sorry if I didn’t explain this in detail. I don’t want the page number to start back at 1 after the cover page. If the 4th page is a cover page, I want to skip that page and not add a page number. Then the next page within the document would be page 4 in the footer. And so on and so on.

Your help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Karen

See also:

• Header/Footer Settings Recap

More complex!You need to use a calculation field with the page field.
Each section's pagination is set to continue from previous, not restart.

Assuming the only section breaks are to start a cover page...
something like: { = { Page } - { Section } }

You cannot type the braces {}.
See Dealing with Fields in Microsoft Word.

FWIW, Charles' suggestion of the page number fiddling will allow you to change the page numbers in the footer BUT the Table of Contents will not align with those displayed 'page numbers'.

That latest bit of information reminds me of your initial post where you said you were able to post-process the page numbers in PDF so you do know how to edit PDF files.

With those two bits of information, I would recommend:
1. Create two documents
Doc 1 = Covers
Doc 2 = Body content and Table of Contents
2. Export both docs to PDF
3. Insert the various cover pages as new pages into the Doc 2 PDF

Now thinking about it, another solution would be to create the Word doc and put all the covers at the back of the file after a section break. Then you can either:
a. Save As PDF and use a PDF Editor to move the resulting pages to position the covers where you want them.
b. Use the Print command to create the PDF and specify the pages in a non-standard order eg 1-8,21,9-14,22,15-20.

Of the two above options, (a) would allow you to have PDF bookmarks working in the resulting file but (b) would probably not so if you wanted that you might need to manually add them with a PDF editor.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia