How To Do Page Numbering in Mac Pages

You can add page numbers to the top or bottom of all of your pages in a Pages document. Learn how to add and modify them, skip pages, style the text and more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Page Numbering in Mac Pages. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 
So I often get questions about numbering pages in a Pages Document. Here are the basics. First, there are two modes for Pages. Word Processing Mode and Page Layout Mode. Most of what I'm going to talk about has to do with word processing mode which is probably where you want to use Page Numbering. You can tell you're in Word Processing Mode if you look in File, and then you see Convert to Page Layout. This means you're currently in Word Processing Mode. Also, if you show Layout in the View Menu you'll see here, in the middle of each page, a large text area. This text area flows from one page to the next. In other words you just keep writing and automatically add more pages. This is Word Processing Mode. 
Another thing you'll see in Word Processing Mode are a set of Headers and Footers. So with Show Page Layout turned On you could see the three boxes for the Headers here. The left, right, and center boxes. Likewise at the bottom of every page you're going to see left, center, and right boxes for the Footers. Even if you turn Off Show Layout you can still see these by simply moving your pointer over that area and they appear. So here are the footers for the first page and you can see here are the headers for the second page. So if you add something to any one of these six boxes it will be on every page in the document. So, for instance, if I were to type some title here in the center box for the header, then if I go down to the next page you could see it's there. It's on every page here. So the same content appears on every header on every page. Likewise if I were to select it and remove it, even though I'm here on page three, it is now gone on all the other pages. 
So this is how you add Page Numbers. Let's say you want to add a page number to the center of the bottom. So you'd go to the Footers here and click on the Center box. When you do that you're going to get the little pop-up here. Just ignore it and type whatever you want. Or you can click it to insert a Page Number there. So you can't just type a number. Like if I type the number one here I've manually entered one and told Pages that I want text one to appear at the bottom of every single page. That's not what you want. Instead what you want is to use Insert Page Number and select one of these four options. I'm going to choose the first one. This also puts a 1 there. But it is only a 1 because this is page one. It's actually a symbol representing the page number. So on page one it shows a 1. But if I scroll down to page two it shows a 2. If I scroll to page three it shows a 3. I only had to do that in one of the center boxes for the Footer on any page for this to be on all the pages. Likewise if I delete it here, on page 3, it is deleted for all pages. It's not there on page 2. It's not there on page 1 or any other page.
Now, as you saw, there's some variations to this. When I click on a blank box here I can Insert Page Number and you can see I can do just Page Number, I can do a page number and then the word of and then the total number of pages in the document. I can also do the word Page and the page number and a combination of those two things. So let's choose this last one here. You can see it says Page 1 of 7. If I go to the next page you can see it says Page 2 of 7. But what if I were to change this. Like maybe let's type lower case page or it could be completely different from word. It's reflected on all the other pages as well. I could substitute something else for the word of. I can substitute something for the word page. I could put something after it, like this, and you could see it is reflected on every single page. In fact, you don't even need to use that little pop-up. I can delete all of that and I can go to Insert Menu. You can see I can insert Page Number or Page Count. I can do Page Number and then a space slash space and then Page Count and you could see how now it puts 1/7. On the next page it's 2/7. So these are both symbols. The page number and the page count and then all the other text I type is just taken and reused on every single page.
Now you can put this in any of the six boxes here. So, for instance, if instead of having it on the Footer I want to have it in the Header I could, say, have a Title here in the left box and I can insert a page number here, let's do Insert Page Number space slash space, insert Page Count and you can see that's my Header now. If I go to the next page you could see I've got the same thing, the same text here on the left that I've typed and the same Page Number and Page count with a slash between them on the right. 
Now let's talk about formatting. If I were to go here in the center footer box and Insert Page Number and choose this kind of page number here I can go into the right sidebar under Format and change the styling for this just like you can for everything else. So if I were to select this and make it Bold and maybe change the font to something else notice now if I go to the next page it changes there too. As a matter of fact there's even a Header and Footer Style here. So if I were to put something here and something here there's the Header and Footer Style. If I were to select this and say make it Bold and let's change the color to something else, like that, and Update the Style it updates the style that is used for all of the boxes right now. So you can do any manner of formatting. For instance I can change this word here, just the word of, I can make that, say, a gray color like this and then notice that it is going to be gray here on the other pages as well. 
Now let's say instead of using Arabic numbers we want to use Roman Numerals. You can do that too. So let's Insert Page Number and just use the regular page number like that. Now if I go to the Documents Sidebar and I go to Section, you can see there is a part here that for Page Numbering. There is a Format part here. So I can use Capital Letter Roman Numerals, I can use Lower Case Letter, I can even do letters like A, B, and C. Let's do Lower Case Roman Numerals here and you can see how it changes the format here and for all of the pages. 
Now let's change that back to regular numbers here. Let's look at another part of the section. These little radio buttons here Continue From Previous Section or Start At a number. So notice that this isn't the Documents Sidebar Document, this is Document Section. So what are Sections? Well, a word processing document can be broken up into sections. Now you can just have a word processing document with one section that's the entire document. That's what we've seen so far. That's why I can set the Headers and Footers for one page and they are the same for the entire document. But, in fact, they are just the same for the section. But if there is only one section that's the entire document. However, what if we have multiple sections. So let's go here to the 4th page and at the beginning of this 4th page, you can see I've got a jump from page 3 to page 4. If I actually go to View and then Show Invisibles I can see here a symbol for a Page Break. Let's go to the character after that Page Break and the beginning of this and delete. Hitting the Delete Key removes the page break, but instead of inserting a Page Break this time I'm going to insert a Section Break. It seems to do the same thing. It is a slightly different symbol and it jumps to the next page. But now it is a different section. Look what happens if I use the Thumbnails here on the left. If you don't see these you can go to View, and choose Page Thumbnails. If I select Pages 1, 2, or 3 notice how there's a faint highlight around those three pages and not the rest. If I select pages 4 and on there's a faint highlight around 4 and on. So it is showing you that these are two different sections here. 
Now what you can do is you can actually customize the Page Numbering for each section. Right now I've got this checkbox Continue From Previous Section. That's selected for the first section. If I click and select for the second section it's there for the second section as well. But what if with the second section selected I change this to Start At. Now, this will Start At whatever this number is. So notice how Page 3 ends with 3. But Page 4 now goes back to one because I have it start at 1. Page changes to start at 2, 3, 4 and it will make more sense to say if I had it Start At 8. So it jumps from page 3 to page 8. I may want to do that if perhaps I'm going to insert from some other document pages 4, 5, 6, and 7 and bind them together in a book. So I don't want it to go from 3 to 4. I want it to go from 3 to 8.
Now another thing you can do is not have the Headers and Footers go from Section to Section. So, for instance, with the second section selected I can say Don't Match the Previous Section when it comes to Headers and Footers. If I turn that Off and then let's say I add something like of and then Insert and then let's do Page Count. So now in this Section here we've got 8 of 11, 9 of 11, and so on. But that's no longer matching the previous section. So if I go to the previous section you could see that doesn't have the of and page count, since I only added that for the second section. So for the first section it does match Previous Section. But for the second section here it doesn't. So you can have your Headers and Footers vary from section to section by using this. You can have the Page Numbers vary from section to section using this.
Now keep in mind you can have Section Breaks whenever you want. You can have a Section as small as just one page if you need a special page that doesn't have a page number on it or represents page numbering differently. 
So let's take a look at one more thing in Word Processing Mode. That's what if you have facing pages. So you can have facing pages by going to the Document Sidebar, Document and then in here if you scroll down to Document Margins you can turn on Facing Pages. Now when you do you'll see here in the Thumbnails things represented as Left and Right Sides. Of course the first page being on the right side and then each page after that being in pairs. As a matter of fact you can zoom out and you can see the pairs of pages like this. You do have the option under View, Zoom to actually have one page or two page view. So, you'll probably want two page view for doing facing pages like this. Now what's interesting that you can have Headers and Footers that vary from left to right. But to do that you need to actually go to Document, Section and then look for Left and Right Pages are different. Turn that On and of course that is per section so if you have multiple sections make sure you have everything selected to change it for the whole document or just the one section selected to change it for that one section. 
Now let's go in here and let's get rid of this Page Numbering there. Instead let's have it so the Left pages have the page number on the left side. You can see when I do that it inserts the number 2 there but it didn't put anything on the Right side. All the left side pages have a page number. But the right side pages don't. They are separate. So I need to put those on the right side here and now I can see the right side pages have it. So, I've got Left and Right like that. Basically the Left Pages and the Right Pages have separate Headers and Footers. So I can also, say, put the Title of the book here in the Center on the Left Side and say the title of the section or perhaps the volume number or perhaps the author's name in the Center on the Right Side. They would be different between the left and right sides. You also have the option here to Hide the Headers and Footers on the first page. So in this case this maybe the Title page here. I could turn this On and you can see that there is no Footer there for the first page. So this could be something where the Title of the book and the author's name here and there's no page number and then you can see here it starts on page 2. If you wanted this title page to not be page one you could do that by making it its own section. Having a section break here at the end of page one. Having this be filled with Title things and have no Header and Footer content there. Then in the second section have your Headers and Footers and then have it Start At 1. 
Now most of the time when you do Page Numbering you're using a Word Processing Document. You can actually do Page Numbering in a Page Layout Document as well. So let's create one. I'm going to use the Blank Layout Template here. So now you just have these blank pages. There's no Header. There's no Footer. There's no BodyText. Nothing. Without Headers and Footers there's no place for your page numbering to go. However the Insert Menu you still do have Page Number and Page Count. You can use them with typing text. You can create a textbox and you can put it anywhere you want. So you can put it here in the Upper Right Hand Corner and you can go in here and insert a page number. You can type of or slash and insert a page count. Then you get those there. I can have these right justified and maybe shrink this textbox a bit like that. It will sit on this page. If I were to go and Insert another page, like this, this page is also blank. I go back to the first page. Notice it says Page 1 of 2 now because there are two pages. I can take this box here, I can Copy it, and then I can go to this page and Paste it. You can see this is Page 2 of 2. These are not Header and Footer elements. I can put this wherever I want on each page. So you can get creative with how you use Page Numbers. But it is actually still works. If you more advanced with Page Layout Mode you can do things like create a page template and the template could actually have this textbox on it which could show the page numbering. So you do have the ability to use page numbering in Page Layout Mode if that is what you want. 
So all that covers most of the uses for Page Numbering in Pages. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 10 Responses to “How To Do Page Numbering in Mac Pages”

Sheldon

8 months ago

Thanks bunches

Lawrence R Simas Sr

Thank You kind Sir!! I always learn something useful from your videos ;-)

Jackie B

This is so useful. Thank you. Now that I know that this feature is an option I will start using it.

What are some criteria for selecting page layout mode versus word processing mode?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jackie: Word Processing mode is for writing: books, articles, reports, journals, essays, anything that flows from page to page. Page Layout mode is for things where there are multiple elements on each page and each page is different: newspaper-like newsletters, signs, labels, certificates, awards, brochures, etc.

Satish Patel

6 months ago

Numbering clearly explained - Thank you.

Deborah Moore

I’m using a Apple iPad. How do I add the numbers to the pages? Please help!!

Deborah: https://support.apple.com/guide/pages-ipad/add-page-numbers-tan5387422b5/ipados

John-Michael

Hi, I'm using pages for the long document with different sections. Up through page 20 it works fine, crossing several sections using "continue numbering”. however, after the section break on page 20, the system starts adding an additional number, so it goes from page 22 page 221. The only thing intervening is a single page break, which I've used numerous other places in the document without a problem. I've double checked and the previous and current section are both set to continue numbering. Pl

John-Michael: Perhaps there is a blank page? Hard to diagnose without being hands-on. Keep working with it.