Printing Duplex for a Portion of a Document

For casual use, copies and copies-of-copies may be fine. Eventually, multi-generation copies degrade. I adjust for the target audience.
I used to ship comb-bound documentation for multi $100,000 systems. So, only first generation printouts on 28 lb high-brightness paper. End users were usually in a subfloor wiring equipment racks together. They loved comb bindings that enabled them to lay manuals flat open. A-size pages beat laptops for viewing details and the BIG picture.

@Steve Wells
I agree that for one-time printing of a few copies of the assembled document, my approach may be an overkill and error-prone. The easiest approach can be to print one copy in two passes for single- and double- sided, re-assemble it in the order required, than use a double-sided copier to get additional copies. You can quickly get 2, then 4, then 8, and so on... copies.

I acknowledge Tomek's ingenuity and work for very complicated page printing setups and repeats over time.

However, suppose the issue is simply, maybe a dozen sets for a proposal in a small business meeting where the content is likely to receive major edits by the next decision point. All the page break points would be different.

Somewhat like the originally posed problem, consider a few copies at most of a 50-page job. Say, 18 pages of single-sided, 20 pages double-sided, and 12 more single-sided. As a practical matter for its simplicity, I'd do the printing as a manual collation process. For all but high-volume printing, it's more time and effort (and maybe more error-prone) to overthink it. In nominal quantities on my own duplex printer, I'd set my printout to single sided, print pages 1-18,39-50. Set to double-sided and print 19-38. Stack the sets manually—good enough. As an analogy, just because I can develop a complex find/replace regular expression, I don't do it to edit a street address in 2 places in a document.

At a job years ago, I had to print lots of user manuals where a few pages had to be in color using a special color printer (to which I had limited access) and all the rest in B&W/grayscale on a high-volume printer. Manual collation was the easy solution, even with a dozen or so copies.

High or repeat volume? Allen's PDF solution above looks pretty good. Unchanging and huge volume? Review Tomek's approach.

Allen stated that "The short answer is that this cannot be done in Word." That may not be completely true - I found the way to set up the document to print it the way Jim wanted, completely within Word with some creativity. Although it is a bit convoluted, the logic of this is simple.

The solution depends on the fact that you can tell Word which pages to print and in which order. For example, you can specify to print pages 1,5-9,20-25,3,3,3,3 and it will print the selected pages in that order including four copies of page 3 at the end.

I suggest inserting a blank page at the front of the document. The page should be completely blank and have neither header nor footer (use different first page header/footer If needed. To keep the page numbers of the rest of the document starting from 1,
I suggest setting this first page number to 0.
Once this is set up, in the print dialog under Settings select “Custom Print” and specify pages to print. For example, if you want to print pages 1-5 single-sided, pages 6-24 double sided, pages 25-30 single sided you would enter:
1,0,2,0,3,0,4,0,5,0,6-24,0,25,0,26,0,27,0,28,0,29,0,30

Please note a 0 after the range 6-24 – this is to prevent page 25 printed on the back of page 24, as the range 6-24 contains odd number of pages.

Unluckily, page selection for printing is not saved with the document and remembered session to session, so it would be tedious to re-enter this information every time the document needs to be printed, but you can copy this selection and paste it into one of the document properties like comments and easily retrieve it when needed.

Below are the steps to achieve the above:
1. Once the document is finished move the cursor to the very beginning of the document and press Ctrl+<ENTER>.
2. Make sure that the document is set to have different first page header/footer. On the empty first page, create a header containing an automatic page number. Right click on it and select “Format Page Numbers”. Select start at 0 and click OK. To keep the page completely blank delete that header; the page number will stay set at 0.
3. Press Ctrl+P to go to print dialog. Select “Custom Print” and specify pages to print as specified above.
4. For safekeeping, copy the page selection and switch to the info tab. Paste the clipboard content into comments field, and save the file.
5. Go back to print dialog. Make sure that double-sided printing is selected.
6. Print the document.

NOTE that the page numbers to be printed are the ones assigned by page numbering, not always matching the numbers indicated in the left part of the status bar.

The blank page could be any page of the document including the last one, as long as you know its number, but having it at the beginning makes it unaffected by any additions or changes of the main document. And assigning it number 0 makes the logic more clear.

This approach has the following advantages over the workarounds suggested in the tip and by the readers’ comments (including earlier one of mine):
• The printout comes assembled in the order you specify, no need to rearrange single- and double-sided pages.
• No need to manually insert blank pages and deal with disrupted page numbering.
• No need to use an external program like PDF reader to insert blank pages, which has the benefit of not disrupting page numbering. Having said that, you can use my approach to print-to-PDF file and have the same result as the second workaround from the tip.
• Changes to the original document are minimal: it only has one extra blank page at the beginning.

I have a potential improvement on @Frank's suggestion: Instead of inserting blank pages, that would somewhat clutter the document. at the end of each page that needs to be printed single sided, insert a section break selecting odd or even page option to skip the next page. In other words you need to choose odd or even page the same as the current page. You need to do it sequentially from the start of the document, because this will affect the numbering of the following pages.

Nice thing about this approach is that any footers or headers will not be printed on the back side of the single sided page similarly to creating a PDF with added empty pages. However, the page numbering in the headers or footers will count the skipped pages, as it would with Frank's approach. I thought you could use your own page counter, but contrary to Microsoft documentation, the SEQ field creates an "Error! Main Document Only" if placed in a header or footer.

The 'blank pages in the Word document' approach sounds good, except if your document includes headers and/or footers / page numbers.
Be careful about what the "blank" pages look like. You might want to break the document into individual sections and eliminate headers/footers on even pages in the single-sided sections. That may be more work than the PDF approach, or not.

I don't need to take the detour with PDF, but can insert extra page breaks in the word document and print directly. If I don't want to keep the blank pages in my document, I save it before I insert the blank pages, but not thereafter.

Re: printing duplex for a partial document

Why convert to PDF

Will it not work to simply add page breaks in appropriate places to create the “blank” second side? I am away from my printer for a couple of weeks, so I cannot verify