OpenOffice.org Tips and Tricks Part III: Page 3

Making page numbers in MS Office was so easy, a quick click of Insert -- Page Numbers from the toolbar opened up a dialog box to help you add the page numbers to your document. Doing this in OOo, at least in the simplest format, is fairly quick also. However, as you may have found out, it isn't listed on the Insert menu.

1. Follow these steps to add the page numbering to the footer's of your document:
2. Create a footer to insert the page number into by clicking Insert -- Footer -- Default.
3. Click in the new footer area on the bottom of the document
4. Insert the auto Page Number field by clicking Insert -- Fields -- Page Number.
5. Format the text in the footer the way you want it. For example, use the center or right-align buttons, type the word Page in front of the page number field, and so on. See Figure 4 for an example. You can even add the Page Count field to show how many pages are in the document; for example, Page 1 of 5.

If you want the page numbering to start on a page other than the first in the document, you can make a simple setting change. You for example may want to do this if the first page(s) are title or table of contents pages. However, this works best if you desire to show just the page number, not if you also want to have the word Page shown or the word of and the total amount of pages in the document. To get the words Page or of from not showing up the first page(s) or to get the Page Count field to show the correct amount of the pages, you have to change the actual page numbering scheme, which is a more complicated process than what's given in this tutorial.

The simple way of changing the page numbering is to double-click the Page Number field (1) in the document footer. On the Edit Fields dialog box, change the Offset field (see Figure 5) into a negative number; -1 if you want to skip one page, -2 for two pages, -3 for three pages, and so on.

Now you'll be able to drop your document on the floor and easily organize your pages into the correct order! Don't you feel lucky?

Eric Geier is an author of many computing and networking books, including Home Networking All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies (Wiley 2008) and 100 Things You Need to Know about Microsoft Windows Vista (Que 2007).