How To Deal With Unusual Page Numbering In Mac Pages

Learn how to set up your Pages documents for title pages, front matter, left and right facing pages, skipped pages and much more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at how to deal with some unusual page numbering situations in Pages. 
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So sometimes you have to go beyond simple page numbering in Pages. Having the first page as 1, the second page as two, and so on. Sometimes you need to skip pages. Sometimes you need to have pages that don't have the page number shown and others that do show it. Let's look at a whole bunch of different page numbering situations and how to deal with them. 
Now it is important to realize that there are two different modes in Pages. There's word processing mode and page layout mode. Word Processing Mode is the typical mode that you use. Most of the templates start off this way. When you write it goes from page to page to page. Just one long flowing body text. This is different than Page Layout mode which you would switch to in a few different ways, one of which is to go to File, and then Convert to Page Layout. If that says Convert To Page Layout that means you're in Word Processing Mode. If it says Convert to Word Processing that means you are currently in Page Layout Mode. So let's look at Word Processing Mode first. 
Now you've got a Header here at the top that you only see when you move your pointer over it and a Footer at the bottom. You can add page numbers to either one of those. To make it simpler to see I'm going to add it here to the Header. Let's say I'm going to put it right here in the middle. I'm going to click there and conveniently you get this little button here that says Insert Page Number. You could use that but you could also go to Insert Page Number like that and it will insert the number. So we have 1 there and this is the Header. So if I go down to the next page you can see 2, 3, and so on. Now what happens if you want your document to start on a different page. Like perhaps you're combining several different documents and this document actually starts on page 37. You've got another document for pages 1-36. Well in Word Processing Mode you can do that by clicking Document to bring up the Document Sidebar here. Then Section. Now even if you're not using Sections you still are using sections. You just have one single section in your entire document. In this case the section covers all pages. So, for this one section here you've got things that deal with page numbering. You've got the Format and you could change that. You also have the Numbering. Continue from the previous section and since this is just one section it just starts at 1 or have it start at a specific number. So I can have the Start at, say, page 37 like that. You can see it is 37, 38, 39, and so on. 
Let's go ahead and create multiple sections. I'm going to click on View over here on the left, Page Thumbnails, and you could see all the page thumbnails here. There are two different ways to create a section. One is you could insert a section. That will put a new section at the end. You could also select a specific spot in your text. Like let's say right here at the beginning of this paragraph. Insert a Section Break. That will insert a section break right there. It's like a Page Break but it's also splitting the section, not just the page. So if I click here you see it highlights the page and the section. If I click here it highlights that page and this section. So you can clearly see the two different sections. Now when I go to Document, Section in the right sidebar I can continue from the previous section or start it at a new section number. So I'm going to say, Continue from the Previous, and now you can see this was page 40, so the new section starts with page 41. Or I can say Start At and I can have it skip pages. So I can have it go say to page 47. So this is page 40 and this is page 47. Now you do have the option here to Hide the Headers and Footers on the first page of a section. So when I select that for this section here notice this first page has no Header and no Footer as well. The second page does. It's really handy if the section is going to start off with something like, you know, Chapter 2 here and this is going to be a heading and you don't want have page numbers on those beginning chapter pages. 
Now what if these two sections represents something different? Like this section here is front matter and this section here is the beginning of the book. You want this to start at page 1. That's the real beginning of the book. So now we have page 1, page 2, etc. So what about this section. This section is currently starting on page 37, remember. Let's have that start as page 1 as well. Now we actually have two page 1's. We have this page 1, 2, 3, 4 and then we start over again page 1, 2, 3, 4. I could go back here and also change the Format. Do something like lower case Roman Numerals, like that. Then you kind of have your front matter. You can even do more than that. Let me insert a section break before the beginning. So now I've got this section here with just one page and then this section here is the beginning of the front matter. So with this section I want to have no headers. I could go into the header and delete the page number. Just not have it there. Now when I go to this section I want to turn off Match Previous Section. So it starts its own thing. So this section here has nothing in the Header or Footer. You can make this, say, the Title Page. This section does not match the previous section, uses this type of formatting and starts at 1. Then we go down to this section. Again Match Previous Section is turned off. We're using page numbering here but the format is different and then we have it start at 1 as well. We can even go in here, since we're not matching previous section and make this Bold here and notice how in this section it is not bold and in this section it is. The Headers are not shared. 
Now what about facing pages. Well, if you go to Document and then Document here, then you have Facing Pages as a checkbox right there. Select that and now you'll see the view here shows it like this. You also see the view here show you the pages side-by-side. You can click here and change that to one page layout if you still want to see one page at a time. Let's do that. Do one page layout like that. Now nothing really is going to change with the facing pages. But if we go to Document, Section notice that we have some new options. We have left and right pages are different. So let's go here to the section that is the main part. Just the regular numbered pages 1, 2, 3, 4. Let's go here and let's remove the page number here and insert the page number there on the left. Now this is going to change it for the whole section. So the page on the right still has it there on the left. But if I say Left and Right pages are different now it unlinks the left and right sides. So I can select a page on the right, get rid of this, add the page number there. Now the left side and add page number there. Now the left side shows it in the left header box and the right side shows it on the right header box. We can see that is true for the whole section. Now you can still do everything else that you want like add new section breaks and such and change the Headers for each section. 
Now let's talk about Page Layout Mode. So here I'm going to switch this blank document to Page Layout Mode before I do anything else. It's really important when you're choosing Page Layout Mode that you do it right at the beginning because when you do it it eliminates all the text in the body of the document. So you really want to start with a blank document, switch to Page Layout Mode, and work from there. Now that you did this things work differently. There are no sections. Each page is kind of like its own section. So I can go to View, Page Thumbnails. I see one there. I can add a page and I could let's add four pages here. Each page is its own section. If I choose Format and click on the background of the page you can see Format Page. I've got Show Headers and Footers, Match Previous Page, and then Page Numbering as well. So in the Header here I can click there, insert a page number, and even though each page is its own section this is going to apply to all pages. The reason it does is because the Match Previous Page is On for each one of these. If I go to this one and say Turn Off Match Previous Page you could see it no longer does. It is a blank Header.  This one has it. This one no longer matches it so it is blank and each one after that is set to Match Previous Page.
So I could do something different on each page if I want. I can have it in the center here. I can have it on the left here. On this one I can turn Off Match Previous Page and have it on the right here. Now you can just do this on a page-by-page basis if you have a small document like four pages like this. Note that you can Start At any page number you want. So I could have this first page be page 1. The second page I can have it be page 5. This third page I could say Start At page 8 or 2 and I can just jump around to any page number I want using that.
Now I've cleared out all those Headers there. Let's do something different. This is something you only do with Page Layout Mode. In Page Layout Mode you have templates. If you go to View, Edit Page Templates then you see the templates here. You only have this one blank template. Now this blank template, under Format, Headers and Footers has show Header and Footer and Match Previous Page. So you can set those as the defaults for this template. But you could also create your own text boxes here. Let's create one here and I'm going to put a page number in it. I'm going to do that by clearing out the text box, going to Insert, and then Page Number. Let's make it a little bit bigger so we can see it. Like that. I'm going to move it to the upper left hand corner and shrink the text box down. I don't need it to be that big. Put it like that. That's a template. 
Let's add another page template. Let's call this Right. Let's Control click on this one and rename it Left. So on the right one I'm going to take this and move it to the right here and I'm going to right justify. So now I've got this page template and this page template. Let's create another page template. I have to choose which one to start with. Let's start with the Left one. I'll name this one None and then in here I'll get rid of the page number completely. There is nothing on this template. So I've got these like that. Now I'm going to put Done here. I'm done editing the page templates. Now each one of these is set to that first page template. The one called Left. Let's, instead, change this to Right and you can see how it does that. I still have the Page Numbering set here because I've set a Custom Page before. I've set that to 2. Then let's go here to this one and let's set this one to Left starting at 3. This one let's go and set it to None. So it is actually not going to show a page number. So you can control exactly what happens. You still have the Header here but you can get rid of it if you want. You don't need to have it there. 
So Page Templates give you the ultimate control over exactly what appears in terms of page numbering throughout your document. 
Now note to change the Continue From Previous Page or Start At page numbering settings you have to have something that shows the page number in the Header or Footer. So notice here this will start at 2 but if I want it to continue from the previous page I can't select that. I can fix that by going in here, inserting a page number. Now when I click on the page itself I can say Continue From the Previous Page and I can just turn off the Header and Footer there to get rid of it. Or a better way is just to go in here and delete this and then that gets rid of it and all of the Headers and Footers throughout. So basically when you want to control the page numbering you add this in and now you've got that for all of the pages. Then once you square away your page numbering just go into anyone of these and delete it and now it gets rid of it for all of the different pages. You can just bring it back anytime you want to adjust the page numbering in your document again. 
So it is a little weird that you have to do that. If would be great if you could just alter the page numbering even if it is not being shown. But at least that's the way it works now. So I hope this gives you all the techniques you need to number the pages in your document anyway that you want. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Deal With Unusual Page Numbering In Mac Pages”

2 years ago

Thank again Gary! Just as recently as last week I was trying to resolve page numbering in a document and this is the best training I've seen on how to control page numbering (in particular for Apple Pages, but even just understanding word processing versus layout, which I've never fully understood). One question though, at the very end, why would one need to control the page numbering (I assume that means order) when being able to put whatever you want on your templates?

Gary Rosenzweig

JL: Not quite sure what you mean. If you have 4 pages, you could just put numbers on them manually. But for more, it may be nice to still use automatic numbering.

Louise Tuckee

1 year ago

My WORD PROSESSING file shows that each page as a separate section. I can see the section line and icon at the right end when I go to show invisibles. I have no idea why each page is a section when the file is NOT in word processing, When I insert a number, the following page footers are all copies of whatever number I insert, not consecutive 1,2,3, etc. How can I get numbering to be consecutive? Also, I am unable to change the numbering formats. I began with a blank template.

Louise: Make sure that the pages/sections are set to follow with the last page number and not start at a specific number.

Comments Closed.

How To Deal With Unusual Page Numbering In Mac Pages

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Deal With Unusual Page Numbering In Mac Pages”

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