Sometimes you want to set a watermark on a Word document. This article explains what a watermark is, why you might want to add one to your document, how to add a watermark, how to customise a watermark, and how to remove them.

What is a watermark?

A watermark is a word, phrase or picture that appears “behind” the text in a document. It gets its name from the physical marks that are created during the paper-making process. The pulp is floated in water, and a frame is brought up under it to collect the pulp into a square. The frame is lined with thin wires (and symbols or text can be included, too) and when the pulp is collected in the frame, it will be thinner where there’s a wire or other protruding part of the frame. When the pulp has dried into a sheet of paper, the thinner parts of the paper will let through more light when held up to a light source, and so you can see the symbols and words, as well as the lines of the original frame (this is how papermakers marked their stock and also how you can tell how a book was put together. For more information on the fascinating world of watermarks, you can start off with this Wikipedia article.

Why would I want to watermark my Word document?

If you watermark a document, whoever opens that document will see the watermark sitting behind that document. This is basically to stop it being used either in their everyday work or for other commercial purposes. It’s very much like the way that photos from mass sports events or wedding photographer sites often have words printed faintly across them. It stops you printing them out and using them without buying them.

Some reasons to do this:

• You’ve prepared a document for someone and you’re charging them after you’ve completed the job. Sending them a watermarked document will proved that you’ve fulfilled your side of the bargain but prevent them from actually using the document. Once they’ve paid you, you can send them a non-watermarked version.
• You’ve prepared a document to send out to people but you don’t want them to share it further or claim authorship, or you want to remind them it’s a sample. I’ve done this with the sample chapter of my book that I send out to people who sign up to receive my newsletter. It has “Sample” written across the page behind the text, so that people can’t use it in another way and to remind them that it’s just a sample and they can buy the whole thing.
• You’re sending out a late reminder of an invoice and if you were doing it on paper, you’d use one of those URGENT stamps and red ink.
• You’re creating a corporate document and want to include corporate branding of some sort behind the text.

Note that if you’re watermarking to protect your work, the watermarking should go alongside copyright statements if you want to use it for that purpose, and I’m not an expert on, or advising you on, copyright here – just telling you how to apply a watermark.

How do I add a watermark to a Word document?

To access the Watermark menu, go to the Page Layout tab, then look in the Page Background area, where you will find the Watermark button:

The Watermark button has a small downward-pointing arrow which implies that you can access a menu. Click on the arrow and there’s the menu:

If you select any of the standard examples that they give you (and note the scroll bar on the right, which you can use to see more default watermarks, that watermark will go straight onto your document. But you might want to customise the watermark in terms of wording, colour, text size and font, etc. and you can do that by selecting Custom Watermark at the bottom of this menu.

How do I customise my Word watermark?

Of course you will find lots of options for customising. Select Custom Watermark at the bottom of the Watermark menu to access the Custom Watermark menu:

You can see here that the menu defaults to No watermark, because that’s what we started with. But there are options for adding a Picture watermark or Text watermark, and you select which you want to work with by clicking on the radio buttons in the left-hand margin. We’re going to work with a text watermark in this example, so we click on the radio button next to Text watermark:

Now the fields to do with text watermarks become active (are no longer greyed-out) and we can change the language, the actual text, the font, size, colour and orientation.

Here I’m changing the text – it defaults to the first standard text but you can just type in what you want to appear there. I’m also changing the colour – but note that I’ve left Semitransparent ticked. If you don’t do that (see below), the watermark will be much heavier and will actually obscure part of the text … which can be useful, of course!

Once you’ve made your choices and changed the text, colour, etc., press the Apply button to apply the changes.

And here’s my custom watermark – my text, in the colour I chose.

Advanced watermark customisation

We won’t go into all the detail about customising here, as the menus are pretty self-explanatory. You can use the Picture watermark option to, for example, add your company logo to a tender document, or another image to make your documents look more attractive (beware of making them too “busy” or, worse, undermining their readability: remember that you need to consider people with low vision who might be reading the printed or on-screen document, and if you suspect the document might be photocopied in the future, steer clear of a lot of watermarking, as it’s apt to become darker and more visible when it’s copied).

A quick look at transparency: if you untick the Semitransparent box in the Custom Watermark menu above, your watermark will be a lot heavier and may obscure some of the text. Here I’ve changed the colour to black and unticked Semitransparent.

How do I edit my watermark?

In the case I’ve just shown you, I simply went back into the Watermark menu then the Custom Watermark menu; my choices were there already and I changed them. The choices you have made will stay in the menu until you change them or remove the watermark entirely, so you can pop in and adjust it as you like.

How do I remove watermarks?

If you want to remove the watermarks on a document, go to the Watermark menu and select Remove Watermark:

Of course, this means that other people could remove your watermark, too. So if you watermark a document to protect it, and you don’t want someone to remove that watermark, you will need to protect the document itself by making it uneditable, either by security protecting it or changing it into a pdf document (the latter is what I have done with my sample chapter). That’s an article for another time …

How do I apply a watermark in Word 2013?

If you’re using Word 2013, you will need to note that they’ve added an extra Design tab, and you’ll find the Watermark feature there.

How do I create a default watermark for all of my documents?

There’s no way to save a default watermark or add one permanently to your watermark gallery. If all of your documents are going to have the same watermark, it’s best to create a blank document with the watermark applied, then save it as a Word template (Save – Save as – drop down Type – Word template). Then, use that template when you’re starting a new document in Word. Thanks to my commenters for suggesting this addition to the article!

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This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

If you found this interesting, you might also be interested in:

How to protect your document in Word 2007

How to protect your document in Word 2010

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

How do you change the colour of the text in your Word document?

Why would I want to change the colour of the text in my document?

You might want a section of the text to stand out, to match your company branding or to look attractive on a menu or other display document. It’s easy to change the text colour to do this.

Note: don’t use changed text colour to alert your proofreader/editor to something you want to do – read this article to find out why.

How to change the text colour using the menu bar

You can find the text colour button in the Home tab, in the font section of the menu bar:

Make sure the text that you want to appear in a different colour has been highlighted. Locate the letter A with a red underline and click on the down arrow to the right of the letter to access the Colour menu:

To see how to use this palette, hop down past the next section and join me at “How to select your colour”.

How to change the text colour using right click

You can do a lot to a chunk of text by highlighting it and right-clicking. Try that on some text now by highlighting it then right-clicking over the highlighted text:

You will now find not one but two ways to change the text colour – a button with an A underlined in red (circled) and a Font menu (arrow). If you click on the button, you’ll get to the same point as in the section above. Click on Font for now ..

In the Font menu, you’ll find all sorts of things you can do to your font – very useful if you want to apply particular effects to the highlighted section of text. For now, we’re going to use the drop down arrow under Font color to select our font colour:

We’ve now got a choice of basic colours, with common ones at the bottom. Click, for example, on the first green, and your highlighted text will turn green, although you’ll need to press the OK button to make that change stick:

How do I choose a custom colour for my text?

You can, of course, go even more customised than this. In both ways to access the menu, you’ll find the words More colors… at the bottom of the palette:

Clicking on this option will give you the Customise colours dialogue box, with two sets of increasingly customisable colour palettes to choose from. First of all, we have Standard colours:

You can see that we’re on the Standard tab here: there are plenty of colours and shades of grey to choose from, and you click on the colour and press OK to accept it. Or, if you’re feeling really adventurous, you can select the Custom tab …

… and have a huge range of colours to choose from. Here, you can click on the colour and then move the arrow up and down to adjust the amount of black in the colour, and it handily shows you the original and new colours at the bottom of the dialogue box.

Now you know how to change the text colour in Word to an almost infinite number of colour choices. You can use the same button or right-click and font option in Excel and PowerPoint, too.

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This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

Today we’re going to learn about the different kinds of justification that you can use in Word documents, and why we would choose to use the particular options.

What is justification?

Justification is the way in which your text is set out on the page. A margin is justified if all of the words on that margin are aligned vertically. For example, this article uses left justification: all of the lines of text start in the same place on the left, unless I manually indent them using tab or bullet points, and all of the ends of the lines present a ragged appearance on the right.

How do I set the justification in my Word document?

You will find the justification menu under the Home Tab, in the Paragraph Section – four little buttons with indications of what the text will look like:

You can see four little buttons, in order from left to right: left justification, centre justification, right justification, full justification.

To set the justification for text that you have already typed, highlight the text and press the appropriate button. To start typing in a particular layout, press the button, check that it’s gone orange, and then start typing.

Left justification

Left justification means that all of the lines of text are lined up on the left hand side, but are ragged on the right:

Full justification

Full justification is very common and does look neat, although it can have some issues, as we find when we try to type text in a column or table using this form of justification:

Right justification

Right justification can look a bit odd in a text (and can be confused with the right-to-left text direction, which would of course use this as standard rather than left justification). However, it is extremely useful if you want to line up a list of numbers or prices so they look lovely and neat. This works in tables and columns of course, too, and makes it so easy to make things look tidy.

Centre justification

Centre justification is hardly ever used in anything but a heading, a poem, maybe, or something with a special design like a menu. But if you want to do it, here it is. One thing you need to watch out for is that if you hit the enter key to make a new line in order to get the effect or layout that you want, Word will helpfully capitalise the first word on the next line for you (see circled text below). However, at least in Word 2007 and Word 2010, if you change this to lower case once, it will leave it on lower case the next time! Clever Word!

We’ve learned in this article about what justification is, the different kinds of justification, their advantages and disadvantages, and when you might want to use them.  I hope you’ve learned something useful here!

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

This article explains the correct – and incorrect – way to add line numbers to a Word document. Why would you want to do that? Read on and find out! This works for Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013.

Why do I need to add line numbers to a Word document?

I was inspired to write this post after my colleague Katharine O’Moore Klopf mentioned that she’d been asked to do this by the editors of a journal for which she was editing an article. Presumably they wanted to be able to refer to particular line numbers in their criticism of the piece.

Transcriptions will sometimes have line numbers, if they’re going to be discussed in detail, and we can probably all recall from our dim and distant pasts working on critiques of poems and plays which had 5, 10, 15 etc. in the margins.

So these are all reasons for adding line numbers to a Word document.

How NOT to add line numbers to a Word document

If you find the need to add line numbers, it’s kind of natural that you might think – oh, I’ll just make the whole document into a numbered list. Well, to do this you would have to put a return at the end of each line to make it into a new line. Then you would highlight the whole text and add numbered bullets. But, oh, look what happens:

The numbers push the lines across and they run over onto the next line; all possibility of right justification is lost; and heaven help you if you want to insert or delete any text once you’ve done it!

So, don’t do that.

How to add line numbers to a Word document – the correct way (Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013)

Line numbering and its options can be found in Word 2007 and Word 2010 in the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup area. There you will find Line Numbers:

Click on the arrow next to Line Numbers to bring up its Options menu:

It will automatically be set to None – choose Continuous and see what happens to your paragraphs …

Line numbers have automatically appeared, but the formatting of the text, its justification etc., remain as they were. This menu also allows to you to choose whether to restart the numbering at the beginning of each page, or each section, or to suppress the numbering for the particular paragraph your cursor is in.

Line numbering options in Word

You also have a number (sorry!) of options to choose from in order to customise your line numbering. You reach these options from the last item on the Line Numbering menu …

… although when you click on this option, you are taken into a general dialogue box for Page Layout:

and you need to click on Line Numbers… at the bottom, which will finally give you a list of options:

To go through the options in order …

• Add line numbers – this gives you the chance to add or remove them at this stage
• From text – the distance between the text and the number. Click on the arrows to choose the distance (I usually just use Auto)
• Count by – this allows you to display only every x number. I don’t think “Count by” is a particularly useful way to describe this, but scroll down to see it in action
• Numbering Restart each page / Restart each section / Continuous – this repeats the options you found on the first screen, but it’s useful to have them here if you’re generally messing around in the Page Layout menu and don’t want to go out of it to set your line numbering

Whatever you choose on here, click OK twice to get out of this dialogue box and the Page Layout one.

How do I produce a line number every five or ten lines?

You may remember from literature lessons at school that poetry and plays often have every 5th line marked. You can do this in Word by choosing that Count by option in the Line Numbering Options menu (see above for how to get to it).

Set the number to 5 …

… and as if by magic, when you return to your document after choosing OK – OK, you will find every fifth line numbered:

Working in Word 2003

In Word 2003 you will need to follow these menus: File – Page Setup:

Choose the Layout tab in the dialogue box and the Line Numbers button. Choose to Apply to the Whole document or This point forward. Click on Line Numbers:

Tick Add line numbering and choose to Restart each page/section and Continuous. Click OK twice to accept – in this dialogue box you also find the options Start at, From text and Count by that are explained above.

Thanks to Katharine O’Moore Klopf for the Word 2003 screen shots and instructions.

Copying and pasting a document with line numbers

It’s come to my attention (thanks to a commenter on this post) that it’s not possible to copy and paste text with line numbers into a new blank document.

This is because the line numbers function actually displays a feature of your document (much like if you turn on paragraph marks) but the line numbers are not a part of the document itself.

If you want to transfer your line numbers into another document, you can do this in one of two ways:

1. Save As the document to make an exact copy (with a different file name) and then add your other text around it
2. Copy and paste your text into a new document and add the line numbers again

At least we know now …

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This article has explained why you might want to add line numbers to your document, and how to do it. If you found this useful, please post a comment, share and like this article! Thank you!

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013 all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

This article explains how to add and remove hyphenation in a Word document, and how to work with the options you have in the hyphenation menu.

Why would I want to add hyphens to a document?

This issue doesn’t normally come up with standard documents where the text is in a smallish size and extends across the entire width of the page. In fact I hardly ever see it in the work I do, and was only reminded of it when a client had accidentally set automated hyphenation in part of his document that happened to contain long words. Where did all these hyphens come from, I wondered.

It is useful, however, if you are working with columns, say in a table, or for a newsletter you’re publishing, or some other part of a document where you want to have a narrow band of text running down the page. If you just put your text in your column and don’t justify it on the right hand side, you will end up with a very ragged look:

In fact, as you can see (marked by the arrow), one word is just too long for the line and splits at the last letter, something which doesn’t obey any of the standard rules of hyphenation (I bet this has happened in your tables – it has in my clients’).

Maybe we can neaten it up by applying Right Justification …

Oh no! In its effort to make everything tidy, Word has carefully inserted huge spaces between words (unlike someone typesetting properly on a computer or by hand, it doesn’t space out the letters in the words so much as just add massive spaces). And poor old Mr Long Word is still dangling a letter onto the next line.

This looks pretty horrible, doesn’t it. Adding automatic or manual hyphenation is the way forward.

How do I add automatic hyphenation to my Word document?

To work with the hyphenation options, we need to be in the Page Layout tab, and the Page Setup area, and there you’ll find Hyphenation (with a little pop-up box explaining it). This is the case in Word 2007 and Word 2010. In Word 2003, you need to select the following menus: Tools > Language > Hyphenation.

If you click on the arrow to the left of the word Hyphenation, you get a menu that looks like this:

You can choose here between None, Automatic and Manual, and then have some options, too. We’ll look at those options in a moment.

What happens if I add automatic hyphenation to my document?

If you highlight the text and then select Automatic from the Hyphenation menu, Word will automatically insert hyphens into the text to break the words in sensible, permitted places (there is a whole art to this which I will discuss another time. I’m not sure which exact rules Word follows, but a quick look shows that it’s pretty good). So if your text is right justified, you’ll get this:

You can see here that Word has hyphenated all of the longer words that previously caused those big gaps, and made the text an awful lot tidier.

You can do this on unjustified text, too:

but I personally think that this still looks a bit messy.

How do I remove automatic hyphenation?

To remove automatic hyphenation when you find it in a document and don’t want it, highlight the offending text and choose None from the Hyphenation menu in Page Layout > Page Setup:

All of the automatic hyphenation should disappear.

How do I use manual hyphenation in my document?

If you choose the manual hyphenation option, based on where your cursor is placed at the time you select this option, Word will give you a choice of where and whether to hyphenate your words:

(here we can see our unhyphenated text, with the cursor on “demonstrate”). Once you’ve clicked on Yes or No, it will hop along to the next word that’s a candidate for hyphenation.

Why shouldn’t I just hyphenate totally manually?

Of course, you can just look for gaps and manually type a hyphen in the middle of the word, and it will split over two lines. However, this is a concrete character that you’ve inserted into the word, and so if you change the wording in your text so that the offend-ing word no longer comes at the end of the line, you’ll retain the hyphen charac-ter and get artefacts like the ones you can see in this para-graph. Much better to automate the manual process, so to speak …

What are the hyphenation options?

If you click on the Hyphenation Options at the bottom of the Hyphenation dialogue box, you are given a few choices:

Working from the top …

• Automatically hyphenate document – does what it says on the tin
• Hyphenate words in CAPS – you may not want to split long acronyms, etc. – if not, then untick this box
• Hyphenation zone – this is the maximum space allowed between a word and the right hand margin. Increase this number and the hyphenation zone becomes wider – and you will have fewer hyphens. A lower number will give you more hyphens
• Limit consecutive hyphens to – allows you to prevent Word from hyphenating at the end of every line – best adjusted once you’ve set hyphenation and seen what it looks like
• Manual… – gives you another way to get to the Manual Hyphenation feature

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In this article we’ve learned why we might want to apply automatic hyphenation to a document, how we do it, how to remove automatic hyphenation, and the options that are available in the hyphenation menu.

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Do like and share as much as you can, and/or leave me a comment if this article has been useful to you.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

We’re already learned the basics of adding page numbers to a Word document, and now we’re going to look at some more things you can do with page numbers, including:

• how to stop your first page displaying a page number
• how to have page numbers in different formats in your document

This will be particularly useful if you’re formatting the page numbers on a PhD or other thesis or dissertation – many of my student clients don’t know how to do this, which is what inspired me to write this series of articles.

How can I have different page number formats in different parts of my document?

Imagine that you’ve written a thesis or a book – something that has a title page (red), a contents list (blue) and then the main body of the text (yellow). It’ll look something like this …

Now imagine that you’d like to have different page numbering for different parts of the document – for example, no page numbering on the title page, Roman numerals for the contents pages, and then the numbering continuing in Arabic numerals for the main body of the text. Look at a non-fction book or someone else’s thesis and you’ll see that this is how they’re often laid out.

How do you do this? First of all, you need to divide your document into discrete sections, using section breaks. Let’s learn how to do that …

How do I see what formatting I have in my document?

If you plan to insert section or other breaks in a document, it’s useful to be able to see what breaks you have in there already. In the document I’m using an example, I would suspect that the aurhor has added some sort of breaks to make the contents page and then main text start on new pages.

How do we check this? Make sure you’re on the Home tab and then press the Paragraph button in the Paragraph section …

Once you’ve pressed the button, you’ll find all sorts of strange marks appear. You can also see that the new page has been started by inserting a Page Break (and not using the Enter key – hooray. If you want to know the reason for the “hooray”, read this article.

The paragraph mark indicates a return, and the Page Break label shows that a page break has been inserted here. That’s great if you just want to start the next chunk of text on the next page, but we want to format each section differently, and this requires a section break rather than just a page break.

How do I insert a section break?

In order to insert a Section Break, we need to delete the page break first. Highlight the page break and press the Delete key or place the cursor just to the right of it and press the Backspace button. As soon as you do that, you’ll notice that the text which sat neatly at the top of the next page has jumped up onto this page. Don’t worry, it will disappear again …

To insert the Section Break, you need to be in the Page Layout tab (not the Insert tab, confusingly). There you will find an area called Page Setup which includes a Breaks menu:

When you press the Breaks button, you’ll see a menu offering several different options for the break you wish to insert – including our old friend the page break and our new friend the section break.

The one we want is Section Break – Next Page. As the text explains, this will insert a Section Break and start the next chunk of text on the next page – exactly what we want to do. Choose that option and hey presto …

… a Section Break (Next Page) appears on your page. And the Contents page has moved back to Page 2.

Note that in this example, we’re dividing the document into three sections, using two section breaks, so we need to add one at the end of the contents list, too …

So now our document is divided into three sections – 1, the title page, 2, the contents list and 3. the main body of the text:

How do I add different formats of numbers to different sections of my document?

Now it’s time to add those page numbers, remembering that we want no page numbers at all on the title page, the Roman numerals on the conents pages followed by Arabic numerals for the rest of the document.

We’ve seen how to add page numbers before, using the Headers and Footers on the document. We’ll do that in a moment. But this time we need to do something else first: we need to remove the association between each section and make tat sure each one is independent. This will allow us to assign different page number formats to each section (and other formatting – I’ll write about this another time, but it’s the way you get your document to let you have certain pages in landscape rather than portrait orientation, etc.

How do I stop my footer having the same format as the previous section?

The trick here is to make sure that the footers do not simply copy the previous section of the document. if they do, you will have trouble making each section different. We now need to go into the second section of the document and disconnect its footers from those of the first section.

So, first of all, go into the Design tab or just left click on the bottom part of your page, below the text. In both cases, the Design tab will display and you need to look at the Navigation area. You will see that the footer automatically decides to be Same as Previous – we need to disconnect this footer from the previous one. Up in the Ribbon, Link to Previous is highlighted, reminding us that this section’s footer is linked to the previous one and providing a handy hint as to how to stop that.

If you press the Link to Previous button it will turn from yellow back to white, you’ll notice that the Link to Previous note in fhe footer has disappeared. This means that you can format Section 2 independently of whatever’s going on in Section 1,

Note that the Header has its own ability to Link to Previous, which is separate from that of the Footer, which means that you can keep any header text you’ve added to the document working throughout the document without needing to re-insert it into each section.

Before we start getting excited about adding those page numbers, make sure you’ve done the same to Section 3, disconnecting it from Section 2. Changing Same as previous in one section won’t have any effect on the next section:

Remind me how to add page numbers …

Now we’re ready to add the page numbers to the document. Ignoring Section 1, which doesn’t need a page number, we can go into the page number add part of Section 2. Just to remind you, that’s on the Page Number area of the Design tab, and in this case we want to add a page number at the bottom of hte page, so we select Page Number then Bottom of Page and the particular position we require, so as to set up the page number position before formatting the actual numbers.

Now it’s time to format the page numbers. So its back to the Page Number button but we choose Format Page Numbers …

You will see on this example that the page number has automatically inserted itself on the first page of the contents (Page 2 of the document), but it has defaulted to being in Arabic numbers and to helpfully inform us that we’re on page 2 of the document. However, we want Roman numerals, AND we want it to start with Page 1. So, into that Page Number format menu, and there we can …

… choose Roman numerals (top) and start at page 2, not page 2. Press OK to set those …

And look – as if by magic, the page number is now i instead of 2.

Now, for section 3, the main body of the text, we want Arabic numerals which continue from the last number in Section 2. So in this case we choose the Number Format to be the default, Arabic, opion, and tick Continue from previous section. In this screenshot, I’ve already pressed OK, so look at the bottom of the page …

and there’s a lovely figure three.

So, to you what weve done in a colourful and dramatic way which is a bit more over the top than what we would actually want our document to look like, we’ve done this:

And while individual institutions’ formatting rules still take precedence, this is what most of my PhD students like their thesis page numbering to look like.

In this article we’ve learned how to add different kinds of page number to different parts of the document, and more complicated formats for page numbers. If you need more of a recap on the basics of page numbering, see the article on that topic.

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If you’re at all interested in my anti-cholesterol diet book which I used as an example in this document, find out more here.

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

This article is going to teach you the basics of adding page numbers to a Word document, using Word 2007 or Word 2010. Later articles in the series will tackle more complicated topics such as mixing Roman and Arabic numerals and making sure your first page doesn’t have a number if you don’t want it to.

Why add page numbers to a Word document?

Good question? You might have a perfectly nice, short document, that looks a bit like this ..

And you don’t really need to add page numbers. But what if it’s going to be a book, or you’re going to introduce a contents page or index? What if people are going to want to quote from it, or refer back to a particular section? Even though if they read your document on their Kindle, they might not be able to see the page numbers, these are all good reasons why you might want to give your readers some page numbers to help them navigate their way through your text.

Where are the menus and buttons for adding page numbers?

As usual, there are a couple of ways to access the menus and buttons you need for adding page numbers. But, again, as usual, they lead to the same place in the end.

Method One involves choosing the Insert tab. Once you’re there, you’ll find a section called Header & Footer, and there’s your Page Numbers button:

Method Two involves clicking with your left mouse button in the blank space at the bottom (or top) of your page. Another way to do this is to select the Design tab, but sometimes that doesn’t show up by default. Clicking on the blank bit of the page will bring up the Headers and Footers and your Page Numbers button:

In Word 2003, you can find the page numbers options in the Header and Footer menu.

Now you’ve found the Page Numbers button, it all stays the same from now on, and its menu looks like this:

We’ll look at how to position your page numbers, and then how to format them (it’s best to do it this order).

How do I choose the position of my page numbers?

You will find two options for positioning your page numbers:

1. At the top or bottom of the page

2. Elsewhere in the page margins

To choose the position of the page numbers in the top or bottom areas of the page, choose Top of Page or Bottom of Page (the positions are identical for the two). Here we choose Top of Page:

You can see lots of options for positioning your page numbers, including that fancy “Page 3 of 12” you’ve seen on other people’s documents. To select the position, click on the example that suits you best (you can scroll down for even more choices).

If you try out Page Margins, you will be given another set of options allowing you to insert your page numbers all over the place:

Again, you can scroll down for even more options.

I find that people have one or two favoured number positions and ignore the others (in much the same way that we only use two programmes on our washing machines). But it’s useful to know how to find all those extra places, in case you’re working collaboratively or with a client who has particular preferences.

Now we’ll look at some basics of formatting your page numbers.

How do I format my page numbers?

This is best done once you’ve decided on the page number position, and you can come back and format them at any time, by finding and clicking on the Page Numbers button. We’re just going to look at the basics here, with more complex choices being discussed next time.

To format the page numbers, find the Page Numbers button and choose Format Page Numbers:

Select Format Page Numbers and you’ll find some more options for changing your page numbers from Arabic to Roman (or Roman capitals) and for where to start the numbering:

If you drop down the Number format list, you’ll find your choices laid out. You are not likely to want to use anything other than straight Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3 …) if you are just using one numbering style for the whole document; the others will come in handy when we learn how to apply different numeral styles to difference sections of the text. But the choices are there:

Again, Chapter numbering and Continue from previous section / Start at are mainly used when you’re applying different numbering styles to different parts of your document (Roman numerals for the contents page and foreword, Arabic for the main text, etc.) but it’s worth knowing where to find these choices for next time.

So, let’s summarise and look at how to apply standard, straightforward page numbering to a document.

How do I apply standard page numbering to my document?

If you just want simple numbers in Arabic numerals at, say, the bottom right hand corner of each page, here’s how you do it.

First, click on the Page Numbers button and choose Bottom of Page, then select the example that best fits where you want your page numbers to appear:

Then, choose Format Page Numbers and make sure your options are set to Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3 … and page numbering to start at 1:

Once you’ve pressed OK, you will be back in the Footer of your document, with the main text still in grey and the page number in black, because you’re in the Footer, not the main text:

Left click on the body of the text, and the page will reverse – the Footer indicator will disappear, your text will be in black and your number will be in grey, because it’s part of the Footer, not of the text:

How do I insert different types of page number into one document?

In this article we’ve learned how to find the Page Numbers button and how to position the page numbers on the page and format them into different kinds of number. In Part 2 of this series, we look at adding different kinds of page number to different parts of the document, and more complicated formats for page numbers.

If you have found this article useful, please share it using the buttons below, and leave me a comment!

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …