Unable to make Word autofill page numbers

Question

Several MS agents were unable to help. In my Word Doc, I want to number the pages, starting with the first page, after a section break. I've tried many ways, but it won't fill in page numbers on all the remaining pages.

Answer 1

Each Word document has three footers (and three headers) per section. These are all available if you have selected both "Different first page" and "Different odd and even" in Page Setup (or the corresponding options on the Header & Footer Tools ribbon tab).

Linking (or unlinking) applies between sections and it applies per footer type (and similarly for headers, but you can ignore those for now, assuming that you want the page numbers in the footer only). For example, the first page footer of section 1 can be linked to (or unlinked from) the first page footer of section 2.

If all of your footers are unlinked, then you need to add the page number three times per section.

Answer 2

Your screen shot shows "Even Page Header - Section 3". This means you definitely have more than 1 section break, or you could not have Section 3.

With the options you are using, there is one header and one footer for the Different first page option. Then there are 2 more headers and footer, one each for Even pages and another pair for Odd pages. This is why you have 3 headers or footers to edit for each section.

We could get this solved a lot faster if you could upload a sample document to a cloud service, then post a share link here.

Answer 3

Click in a section that does not display the numbers, then double-click on the header or footer area of the page to open the Header & Footer tab. Click on the Link to Previous button to link to the page numbering of the previous section.

If you are using Different first page or Different odd & even, you may have up to 3 different headers and footers per section. Each different header or footer must be set to Link to Previous.

Answer 4

In the Header or Footer (wherever you want the page number), press Alt+Shift+P. If you have enabled either Different First Page or Different Odd and Even, you will have to do this more than once to include all the headers/footers in the section.

Answer 5

As noted in my previous reply, if you are using both Different first page and Different odd and even options (you are using both), you have three different headers and footers in each section. In each section, you must use the Link to Previous command to continue the page numbers for each of those three headers or footers. Using Continuous Section Breaks can make it difficult to link sections. If a given section is so short that it doesn't display at least three pages, you will have to temporarily add dummy pages so that you can link to the previous section for each page.

Please post more details about your problem. Does the page number appear only on page 1, or does it appear on other pages in the document? Where does the numbering stop? Feel free to post a screen shot showing the problem.

Or better yet, upload a sample document to a cloud service, then post a password-free share link here. That is the guaranteed route to a solution.