How To Customize Page Numbers In Mac Pages

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to take control of page numbering in Mac Pages.

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So I've been getting a lot of questions recently about how to better control page numbering in a Pages' document. Sometimes you want to skip pages or have a cover page. So let's take a look at how to get exactly the page numbers that you want. 

Pages has, of course, two modes. Word Processing and Page Layout. Let's start by looking at Word Processing. I'm going to create a blank document and I'm going to paste in some text here to fill out the document. So as you can see I've got a bunch of pages here. Let's go back to the top and add page numbering. You can do it in either the Header or the Footer for the page. Let's do it in the Header right in the center. I'll click here and it's going to give me Insert Page Number, I can click there, and choose one of these options. Now it doesn't make sense to do 1 of 52 if we're going to be skipping pages because that count is not going to be accurate. Just use something standard like just putting the page number. 

Now we can see page number 1 for the Header for that page, then 2, then 3, and so on. Now let's say we want to skip some pages. So let's say after page 3, somewhere in here we want there to be a page break, and then the new page not to be 4 but to be something like 7. But if I were to insert a page break it would split the page right there and I would go to page 4. But that's not what we want to do. We want to have separate page numbering for this next part. We want to actually make it a separate section. So I'll Undo that. Instead of inserting Page Break I'm going to insert a Section Break.

You can see now I've got page 3 and page 4. Page 4 is actually a new section. I can tell because if I click here in the thumbnails on the left, if you don't see these thumbnails go to View and switch to Page Thumbnails there, if I click on any of these first three pages you can see how it highlights the first three pages like that. If I click on the page after that it highlights page four through the end of the document. So it's grouping the sections together with this blue highlight there. 

So in page 4 here I want that to be page 7. The way to do that is to go to the Section sidebar here on the right. To get to the Section sidebar there are two ways to do it. One is to click on one of these thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail there you'll see, under Format, it goes right to Section. However, if you're working in the document, you're actually typing here or you have and image selected or something, you're going to see under Format things that apply to that selection. You can get out of that by either clicking here or clicking in a blank area like an area outside of the body text. Click there and you see it goes to Format, Section.

Under Format, Section you'll see Page Numbering. You could see here Format you can choose. You can also see Numbering, Continue from the Previous Section which is what's happening now. It goes from the last page of this section, page 3, to the first page of this section page 4. Or I can select Start At and the page numbering will start at whatever I want. In this case 1 but what I want to do is 7. So now I go from page 3, that last page of this section, to page 7 the first page of this section. You can see that every page after that just picks up the next page 8, 9, etc.

So now, say, if I were to save this out as a PDF I can then go and edit the PDF in Preview and insert pages 4, 5, and 6. Maybe they are images or special diagrams created in another app and then this would pick up right here with page 7. Anytime you need to skip more pages you just create a new section like that.

Now here's another example. The first page of this document is a title page or cover page. So it has a picture, a title, and some more information. Then the text starts on page 2. Now if I were to click here in the Header and Insert Page Number and add that you could see it shows page 2 here which isn't what I want. This is page 1 of the document. This is a cover page and what's worse is we have a page 1 at the top of the cover page which isn't what you typically see on the first page of a PDF or the cover of a book. So how do I correct this.

Well, I need to break this up into two sections. This first page is its own section. The title page or cover page. Then the second section is the entire interior contents of the book. So what I want to do is first figure out why this text starts here on the second page. In this case I inserted a page break which is something you may have done as well. So if I go to View, Show Invisibles you can see here a page break symbol. Let me go and put the cursor right here at the beginning of the next page. I'm going to hit the Delete key to delete that special character. Now you can see this is a text box and the text starts right after it. 

Instead of inserting a page break like I had before I'm going to insert a Section Break. Now you can see a Section Break character there instead. Let me Hide the Invisibles again. Now I've got two sections. The first thing I'm going to do is get the page number right. Let me go to this section here and click on this page here so I see Format, Section on the right. I'm going to say I'm going to start at page 1. Now the page numbering is right. This is page 1. If I go back here to this section this is also page 1. There are two sections and each one starts on page 1. I don't really care about the page numbering here on the cover page. Of course it's page 1 but I don't want to show that here. 

So I want to have different Headers for each section. So let's go here to the second section again and I want to look here under Headers & Footers and turn off Match previous section. Turn that off. So the Headers & Footers for this section are different than the Headers & Footers for this section. Now I can go in here and Delete the page number there and now you can see no number is shown. But this section here does have page numbering shown. So each section now has different Headers & Footers so I can show the page numbering on Section 2 and not show it on Section 1 and I have what I want. A cover page that has no page numbering on it and a Section 2 that starts with page number 1.

Let's look at Page Layout documents. So here I have a blank template document again but I'm going to go to File and then Convert to Page Layout. This removes the body text so now it's just a blank slate with every single page. I'm going to paste in a text box here just to have something to have on the page so we can see it and let's add another page. So I'll click here to Add a Page. I'll paste a text box on that as well. Let's add a bunch of different pages each with the same text box pasted on it. So now you can see for each page I've got that on it. It's in a slightly different position.

Now if I were to go and click in the Header here it also will insert a page number and you can see this is page 1, this is page 2, this is page 3. The difference with Page Layout is Page Layout doesn't use Sections. Every page is its own section. So a five page Page Layout document is the same as having five different sections, each one page long. So if I were to click on a thumbnail here on the left or the background of the page instead of Format, Section you should see Format, Page Layout but a lot of the options are the same. 

Now I can have page 1, page 2, page 3 and let's say page four is actually going to be page 6. I'm going to skip two pages. So what I would do here is I would go to Format, Page Layout and I can see the same options here. You may actually have this section hidden here. You can click on this little triangle here to reveal it. I have these same options. I can hit Start At and you can see I can start at page 1. In this case let's start at page 6. Now if I go to the next page that one is set to Continue from previous page. So that's page 7. So I have pages 1, 2, 3 and then 6, 7. So I have complete control over exactly what page number each page is in the document. You also can control the Headers & Footers. Show Header & Footer and Match Previous Page.

So let's say  I want to not have a page number here on the first page. What I want to do is use the Show Header and Footer and Match previous page checkboxes here. If I turn it off you can see it turns it off for that first section. That's an easy way to do it because it's actually turned on for all the other sections. If I had it turned on but I simply wanted to Delete this what it's going to do the next section would match the previous page. So I want to turn that off there and the next section reapply this page number there. Now each section after that actually has Match previous page. So it's going to match whatever Headers and Footers it had before.

That's how you do it. You use Sections in a word processing document and in a page layout document every page is its own section to give you easy control over the numbers on each page.