Add Page Numbers In Word 2013

Adding Page Numbers In Word 2013

Adding page numbers to your Word 2013 document is one of the more common tasks you are likely to perform. Thankfully, adding them is a doddle and there is room for a little customisation too.

The Typical Page Number

The usual place for a page number to appear is at the bottom of your document, beneath the content. You can get such a page number by going to the Insert tab > Page Number (in the Header and Footer group) > Bottom of Page, and then select from the gallery. The gallery is actually quite large and offers different positions and styles of page numbers.

When you select the style you want, the page number will appear on every page of your document, incrementing automatically from one page to the next. The footer area (if that is where you chose to put the page number) remains open for you to make adjustments; you can style the number differently, add more text, even add a picture etc. To close down the footer area, double click in the main document.

If you decide to change the footer, double click in the footer area to open it up for editing and make your changes.

Customised Page Numbers

Regardless of how avant garde you are, your page numbers are going to appear in either the header or the footer of the document. Even though we are avant garde ourselves, we are going to choose the footer for our page numbers, for illustrative purposes. The process for adding page numbers to the document header is very similar.

Double click in the footer area to open it up for editing.

At this point we can add absolutely anything we want, including text, images, SmartArt, tables, etc. Anything you can add to the main area of your document, you can add to the footer. But we are interested in adding page numbers so try and stay focused.

We need a number, but not just any number. If you type in a number, for example “1”, that will work perfectly for page 1 – but no other page. We need to add a system variable. We need to add what Word 2013 knows as a Page Number. So, make sure you are on the Insert tab and click on Quick Parts (in the Text group) > Field, type in “page” to position the list and select “page”. Click OK.

Now the page number appears on every page, and its value is correct. We can select this number and style it as we wish. For example, we could change the font size and text alignment very easily. All the styling features we have in the main document are at our disposal. Really. Go ahead and colour the page number red. Go on.