Compound Page Numbering

Jonathan wondered if there was a way to use two page-numbering schemes within the same document. He has a document that is made up of several sections, and he wants a running header similar to the following:

Page: 27    Effects of Product A and Product B (Page 1 of 5)

The page number at the left is the absolute page number for the document, and the page numbers at the right represent the relative page number and total number of pages in the current section. It would seem that such numbering would be possible, particularly since the same sort of numbers routinely appear on Word's status bar. Not so, however. The page numbering used in Word is a section attribute. This means that you can control the page numbering on a section-by-section basis, but you cannot have two distinct numbering schemes in the document. At least, Word does not provide distinct fields that you can use for such a purpose. These are the only page number fields provided by Word:

• PAGE. This field indicates the current page number. If you don't modify it (by restarting it for the current section or changing the starting page number), then it represents the current page number for the document as a whole.
• SECTIONPAGES. This field indicates the total number of pages in the current section. If your document consists of a single section, then it represents the total number of pages in the document as a whole.

Using these two available fields, it is impossible to do what Jonathan wants, since he needs a third field—one that represents the absolute page number for the current section. There are, fortunately, two workarounds you can use to accomplish the desired result. The first workaround involves the use of the SEQ field, and the second involves the use of PAGEREF fields. The workarounds are quite involved, and the details are best deferred to an archived page originally on the Microsoft Knowledge Base. See this page:

https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Microsoft_KB_Archive/291283

The page has been retired (apparently) from the Microsoft site, and if you check the archive page, you'll note that it indicates that it applies to Word 2002 and Word 2003. (Yep—over 20 years ago!) Retired or not; old Word versions or not, the techniques described in the article also apply to later versions of Word just fine. (The steps that implement the techniques may require a bit of adjustment, but shouldn't be a big problem for most Word users.)

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11640) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365.