The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

Well, this is a tech blog so I should really write more of these but this is one that came up the other day at work that might be useful to any of you out there working on a dissertation paper (or if you want to do this for some odd reason).  This solution is for Microsoft Word 2003 but should function similarly in Word 2007 if you can actually find the icon for it!

The Question

“How do I have Roman Numeral page numbering for the first 10 pages or so, and then have Word switch to Arabic numerals for the rest of the document?”.

The Answer

The way that you do this is actually pretty easy once you know it can be done.  What you have to do is first

go to the insert menu and choose “Page Numbers”. The dialog below will pop-up and you have various options such as including the number on the first page and where at on your page you want the numbering to show up.  In this example I told it to do 1,2,3 numbering after clicking on the “Format” button.

After this, you will have the 1,2,3 numbering throughout your whole document.  What if we only wanted that in our table of contents and then Roman Numerals (e.g. i, ii, iii, iv, v etc) for the rest of it?  We need to go to the

Insert menu again after placing our cursor at the bottom of the last page that you want to have the old numbering.  So in my 2 page sample document, I put my cursor at the bottom of the first page.

Go to the Insert menu and select “Break” as the screenshot to the left shows.

After you click on break, you should receive a dialog like the one to the right.  On this dialog you need to select “Next Page” under the Section Break section of the dialog and then click ok.

Ok, now that we have our section break inserted we are ready for the final step: inserting a different style of page numbering!  Note, on this step that you can also view headers/footers and then select the page number itself to change the formatting.  For my example though we’ll go back and use the menu again.

Place your cursor at the top of the page that you want to start your new numbering on and then select whatever style you want (as we did above for 1,2,3) and then click ok.  As you can see in my last screenshot below, I now have roman numerals on my 2nd page, and my first page still has a regular 1 on it.  What is neat is that next page section breaks let you do totally different formatting between sections of your document.  They apply to any formatting, not just page numbering!

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