Can someone help me with tricky page number formatting in Office 2010?

Have you set it up as a long document. So you aren’t trying to create one long doc? Word doesn’t like huge docs and is apt to crash. You have to set it up using an outline. I feel for you. You can set it so the first page of the doc doesn’t have a page number, but I don’t know about how to do that for the first page of each chapter.

Do you have any technical support in your library? We have people you can go to and they are experts in Word/Excel and the like. I knew one of these ladies and sat with her to get my final thesis looking spiffy because I too would have been bald without her. I would try to find a Word expert at your uni library. In the end it will save you hours of hair pulling.

@Bellatrix, thank you for your response. It’s one long document but it’s not too long, only 50 pages or so. I’ve worked with longer ones. That’s not the problem.

And thank you for the suggestion. I’m going to my library tomorrow anyway, so I’ll see if someone can help me there :)

Would be a good idea to make contact with the Word expert at your uni anyway. They can help you prepare your thesis and save you hours before you submit.

Sorry I can’t give you a definitive answer to your Word question. While you are there can you ask them about cover pages for me :-)

Does it have to be one document? This would be really easy if each chapter is a separate document. In that case, you just select “Different First Page” in the Header/Footer settings. That takes care of “no number on the first page of each chapter.” For consecutive page numbers, you select “Start Numbering At . . . ” in each document to tell it where to pick up numbering from the previous chapter.

I found a link that may help:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/restart-or-continue-page-numbering-HP005230692.aspx

@give_seek: Thank you for your response. It does indeed have to be one document. I am submitting it electronically and I just want to get it right the first time so I don’t have to waste time on revisions.

I’ll take a look at that link! Sounds great.

And I’ll post here to help other jellies if I figure this out on my own!

OK! I got it! I’m going to post what I did here to help others… And also because I’m going to forget by the time I have to format my PhD thesis, haha…

-I set “Next Page” breaks around the first page of every chapter. Which means that each chapter is two sections: the first page, and the rest of the chapter.

-I created a blank Footer for the whole document.

-I turned off the toggle button under the Header and Footer Menu that says “Link to Previous.” This means that the Footer of each individual section has nothing to do with Footers from previous sections.

-For each section that needed numbering, I clicked in the Footer, then hit “Insert Page Number,” and then selected “Show number on first page” (in other words, the second page of the chapter, because that begins a separate section) and also “Continue from previous section” under “Format” (this means that the count is continuous, not that the visible numbering is continuous.)

now I wonder if I have anything around here to counteract all this caffeine…