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Complex Pagination in Word 2010: Pagination in Word 2010

How to do complex pagination using section breaks and delinking in Word 2010

Complex Pagination in Word 2010

If a patron comes up to you--as will happen at the end of the semester when theses are due--and needs help paginating their thesis in a complex manner in Word, click here for the instructions on how to do this. Here is a example text you can experiment with. The example text imagines that a patron wants lower case Roman numerals in the center at the bottom of the page and after the title page. The title page itself should not be numbered. Then, the patron needs Arabic numerals on the top right hand corner of the page after the acknowledgement page. However, the patron in attempting to do the pagination has ended up placing Arabic numerals in the upper left hand corner of every page, including the title page; alphabetic numeration in the first section, and uppercase Latin numeration in the middle of the bottom page after the Acknowledgements page. 

See the "Instructions" tab to proceed. 

Special thanks as always and for the usual reasons to Dean Howd.

Important Concepts

Sections  Word divides documents into sections. Sections are unto formatting as chapters are unto content. Just as different chapters in a book may contain very different sorts of content, different sections can contain different sorts of formatting. A document may consist of one long section. Most term papers, for example, do not change formatting from one page to another. Likewise a section can be as brief as a single page. Moreover, sections do not have to correspond to other divisions in the document, e.g. sections (formatting) can change in the middle of one chapter and change again in the middle of another or can, and do, change from page to page. 

Delinking is the process by which the formatting from one section is prevented from flowing into the formatting of another section. For the purposes of pagination, you  have to delink both the header and the footer from the formatting of the previous section. In other words it is possible for a new section to have an entirely new pagination scheme in its footer (if the footer was delinked) but keep the previous section's formatting in the header (if the header was not delinked). Why would someone do this? Well, if they wanted, say, a name to flow across the headers of all pages regardless of the changing pagination schemes in the footer.

Here is the sample to experiment with