Formatting your Word document - page numbering
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Listen to this articleBe aware that this is only an example! Always refer to your assessment guidelines provided by your lecturers for each assignment as they may be a bit different!
The usual structure of an assignment paper is the following:
- Title page
- Statement of authorship
- Table of content
- Your actual text
- References
- Appendices
Each section will start on a new page and the page numbering varies as follows:
- The Title page as well as the Statement of authorship don’t have a page number. They stay blank.
- The table of content should be in Roman numerals.
- Your actual body text has an Arabic numerals page numbering, starting from 1.
- The References count as your body text and continue the previous page numbering.
- Should you have any Appendices, you should change or at least restart the page numbering for each appendix. For example, Appendix A will have the page numbering A-1 to A-3, Appendix B will have the page numbering B-1, and Appendix C will have the page numbering C-1 to C12.
How to add different page numbers for each section?
Start by adding the relevent Section Breaks or Page Breaks as follows:
- Title page: Page Break
- Statement of authorship: Section Break
- Table of content: Section Break
- Your actual text: Page Break
- References: Section Break
- Appendix A: Section Break
- Appendix B: Section Break
- Appendix C: Section Break
Adding a Page Break
Go to Insert > Page Break:
Adding a Section Break
Go to Layout > Breaks > Next Page:
How to add Roman numerals?
On your first page of the Table of Content, double-click on the footnote section. By default, you will see the following:
To add a different page numbering you need to change the setting that by default indicates “Same as Previous”.
Go to the Header & Footer menu and de-select “Link to Previous“:
Still in this menu, go to Page Number > Bottom of Page > Plain Number 3:
Still in this menu, go to Page Number > Format Page Numbers:
Select the Roman number format and tick “Start at:“:
How to add Arabic numerals?
On your first page of the actual body text, double-click on the footnote section. By default, you will see the following:
To add a different page numbering you need to change the setting that by default indicates “Same as Previous”.
Go to the Header & Footer menu and de-select “Link to Previous“:
Still in this menu, go to Page Number > Format Page Numbers:
Select the Arabic number format and tick “Start at:“:
How to add custom page numbering for Appendices?
On your first page of each Appendix, double-click on the footnote section. By default, you will see the following:
To add a different page numbering you need to change the setting that by default indicates “Same as Previous”.
Go to the Header & Footer menu and de-select “Link to Previous“:
Simply add manually the letter that corresponds to your Appendix.
For example, you are ading the page numbering for Appendix A, add “A-” before the page number field:
