Creating Point Pages

Larry works for a government contractor that produces very large documents—commonly hundreds or even thousands of pages. When they issue updates to the documents, it is done using "point pages." This means that if the update adds some pages between pages 42 and 43 of the existing document, then those pages are numbered as 42.1 and 42.2. Larry was wondering if there was a way in Word to create point pages and have the page numbering done correctly.

The only way to do this is to, within the document, insert a new section that will contain the point pages. The new section should be formatted so that it doesn't use the same header or footer (wherever you have the page numbers) as the previous section. In addition, the section following the point pages (the original document) will need to have its header or footer formatted to match the original formatting so that it doesn't continue the header or footer in the point pages.

In the new section—the one for the point pages—you can set up the header or footer to reflect the new numbering you want. For instance, you could define a footer that contained "Page 42." (note that this is text, and not a dynamic page number) and follow this text with a page number. Start the page numbering for the section at 1, and you will end up with 42.1, 42.2, 42.3, etc. for all the pages in the new section—the part after the decimal point is the dynamic page number for the section.

In the section that follows the point pages, you'll need to configure the page numbers so that they start with whatever number they should begin with, such as page 43. This allows the page numbering to proceed as it should, until the next point pages section is reached.

You should note that this approach doesn't work well if you need to include any of the point pages in a TOC or an index. The reason is that Word doesn't see the "prefix" on the point pages ("42") as part of the page number; it only sees the restarted numbering. Thus, in the TOC or the index you would see 1, 2, 3 instead of 42.1, 42.2, or 42.3.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8059) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Creating Point Pages.