How to make page numbering start on a certain page in OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice Writer

About a year ago I published a blog post and then a video showing you how to insert page numbers into an OpenOffice.org document.

The video became very popular, and I got some additional questions about the functionality. The question I got recently persuaded me to write this post.
So, what is the question?
Say you write a novel. This is a lengthy document which has a title page, table of contents and some chapters. You want to make page numbering start from a certain page and not include first pages like front page and table of contents. How to achieve this?

---

There are at least two methods to do so.
As an example, I will use the text from my own e-book, which you can find at http://www.sapexpert.co.uk/free-ebook.php. Let's say that our starting point is the document without any page numbers, but with title page and table of contents. I exported that document into PDF, which you can find here.

Method 1

First method is an easy one, but it does not offer you many options.
Go to menu Format – Title Page

You should get a new window where you specify the parameters of your title page. You may be surprised, but “title page” can contain... several pages! Let's use this to convert the three first pages of the document into the “Title Page”.

There are two important points at this screen

1. You can reset page numbering after the title page. I reset page numbers to 1 after the Title page.
   At the same time, you can give title pages their own numbering. I don't need this for my example.
2. You can assign style “First Page” to the Title Page. Please remember this now, we'll use this information in few seconds.

Now let's insert headers and page numbers into the document. While doing it, please pay attention to the type (style) of the page where you add your headers.

I added header to the style Default, but not to the First Page, the style which was assigned to our Title Page.

When you do this, your cursor will be automatically placed in the header you've just inserted. It also means that document will be scrolled to the page with the relevant style, if it is not already being displayed.

Now add page number and format it, as was previously described. As a result, I see page number “1” at the fourth page of my document. Page numbers start at this point and are not shown on earlier pages.

You can see the PDF version of the document here.

Method 2

This method gives you more flexibility. Let's see how it works.
Before doing this, you need to check the style of the pages you want to number differently (or not number at all). You can do this in from the menu Format – Page and then check the value in the field called Name on the “Organizer” tab . All pages of my document, apart from the table of contents, have the style “Default”.

The next thing to check is that you have two different page styles defined in your document. To do so, call up Styles and Formatting windows via the menu Format – Styles and Formatting, or by pressing F11 on your keyboard. The tab Page Styles lists available styles. If you don't have separate page style for your sections, you can create one, for example by copying from an existing one: use the button New Style from Selection. I created style Default1 based on the Default one.

Now the preparations are over.

Let's start with inserting of the page break between the pages which should have different styles. In my scenario I go to the end of the text on page 3 (Table of contents) and then select menu item Insert – Manual Break.

The next window allows you to insert the page break.

I add Page break in my document and apply the style Default1 to the following page. At the same time, I reset page numbering to “1”.

Now let's add header to the pages with style Default1. This is similar to Method 1 described above.

The final step is to add page number and format it in the header, like we did previously.
The result? It is similar to what we got in Method 1. You can see the file here. (link)
Why is this method more flexible than Method 1? Because it allows you to have as many separate numberings in a single document as you like. Create different page styles, apply them to areas of your document, and apply separate page numbering there. For example, no page numbers on the first title and technical pages, then 1-2-3 on the main text, and finally i-ii-iii on the Appendix pages.

How to use non-Arabic page numbers in OpenOffice.org Writer? I have written about this already. It is easy!