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Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
If you're seeing Footer - Section 12, then you have at least 12 sections in the document. Word inserts section breaks when you change page orientation, the number of columns, or certain other page setup settings. If the document originated as an OCR'd scan or was converted from another application (such as Word Perfect), you may have excess section breaks that you don't actually need.
Keep in mind that linking the footers has no effect on page numbering--just footer content (including a page number). Page numbering can be restarted in any section without unlinking it. What you need to do is find the section where the numbering is restarted and set it to "Continue from previous section. In order to do that, you may have to find a section in the middle of a page that doesn't actually have a footer. Take these two steps to make that easier:
- If you haven't already done so, add the Formatted Page Number and Section items to the status bar at the bottom of the Word window (right-click on the status bar and check off these items to add them). This will allow you to see, whenever you click in the document, what section you're in and what page number Word would print on that page.
- Switch to Draft view (View | Views | Draft), which will make it much easier to see the section breaks.
Go through the document section by section, and when you find the section where the numbering restarts, use Insert | Header & Footer | Page Number | Format Page Numbers to get to the Page Number Format dialog, where you can correct the numbering.
