Start page numbers on page 2 or page 3 in MIcrosoft Word

In this video we're going to look at starting our page numbering at something other than page 1, could be page 2, page 3. Now, an example here, we've got our first page, with no page number, we've got our empty page, this is going to be our contents page, our table of contents, that we'll make a little while later, and then our third page has page 1 on it. Let's go and learn how to do that.

To do this, the first thing we need to do is we need to insert a break, so what I'm going to do in my case is, I want this to be on my title page, but then I want there to be a lot of space after this, and to allow room for my heading, and for my contents page. 

So, this is going to be on page 3 now. What I'm going to do is, instead of putting in lots of returns in, or page breaks, what you need to do is, you need to go to-- the cursor, just in front of where you want the page break to be, go to 'Layout', and go to one called 'Breaks'. Drop this down, and there's one in here, there's lots of different options, but you need this one here that says 'Next Page', click on that, that's going to be my first one. Now, if you want your page numbering to start at page 2, that's all you need to do, but I want mine-- so I'm going to leave that as my cover page, and then I'm going to leave in another space for my contents page, so I'm going to insert a second one. 

So there's my page 1, there's my page 2, which is going to be my contents page, but this page 3, remember, I want it to be page 1 now because that makes more sense. So what I’m going to do is, double click anywhere in this empty area down the bottom, that gets me into the header and footer section, you can see up here, 'Header' and 'Footer' tools, everything grays out. 

Now I got to do a couple of things. First thing, it says 'Link to Previous', that just means it detaches from that page 1 and page 2, click on that, nothing really happens, except now, when I go to add my page number, I'm going to insert mine at the bottom of the page, I'm going to use this first one, just as simple. It still says 'Page 3', but now what I can do is I can go into 'Page Number', 'Format Page Numbers', 'Start at 1', click 'OK', and now I close 'Header' and 'Footer', hopefully, if I go to the top now, page 1 has no pages numbers on it, no numbers on it, and page 3 now is now page 1. Confusing, but exactly what we wanted to do.

That's it for this video, let's go check out the next one.