Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated August 17, 2022)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365
Kath has a contract document that is 30 pages long. She can mail merge this document with approximately 50-60 client names. In the resulting merged document, the page numbering is consecutive across all the merged pages. She wonders how she can ensure that the page numbering restarts in each of the merged documents so that she has 50-60 customized contracts, each having pages numbered 1-30.
In doing some testing with this, my page numbering came out correctly. I created a 30-page mail-merge document and made sure it had page numbers. I then merged it with a 40-member client list. The result was a single document of 1,200 pages (30 x 40). Word automatically separated each of the merged documents with a section break, and the page numbering for each document (each new section) began with 1, as it should.
I then went back to my source document and inserted a few section breaks in it, thinking that this might affect the final merged document. I made sure that the page numbering was set to "continuous" for each section in the source document. When I did the merge, Word still handled the page numbering correctly in the merged document. Even though the merged document was still 1,200 pages, the page numbering was correct for each individual 30-page document in that merged document.
If you are not seeing these results with your merged document, you'll want to go to the beginning of each contract in the merged document and place the insertion point somewhere simple, like in the first line of the contract. Then, follow these steps:
Figure 1. The Page Number Format dialog box.
Make sure you repeat these steps for each of the contracts in the merged document. When completed, the page numbering should be correct in the full merged document.
If you have to do this process quite often, you may be interested in using a macro to reset the starting page number for each section of the merged document. This short macro will do the trick:
Sub RestartPageNumbering() Dim oSection As Section Dim oHeader As HeaderFooter Dim oFooter As HeaderFooter For Each oSection In ActiveDocument.Sections For Each oHeader In oSection.Headers oHeader.PageNumbers.RestartNumberingAtSection = True oHeader.PageNumbers.startingNumber = 1 Next oHeader For Each oFooter In oSection.Footers oFooter.PageNumbers.RestartNumberingAtSection = True oFooter.PageNumbers.startingNumber = 1 Next oFooter Next oSection End Sub
Note that you should only use this macro if your source document did not have any section breaks in it.
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