Creating Sections with Different Header and Page-Numbering Schemes

There’s a good chance that you don’t want a header or footer to appear on every single page of your e-book. Pick up any professionally published book, and you can see that no page number appears on the internal title page and that the table of contents, acknowledgements, and other elements in the front either have no page numbers or use Roman numerals rather than Arabic (modern) numbers. No page headers appear on these first few pages, either. (The page header often states the title of the book or chapter or the name of the author.)

When you use sections in Word, the header, footer, and page numbers in your document (or any combination of them) can appear for the first time on the first page after the front material in your e-book. To create sections in your document, follow these steps:

1. On the View tab, choose Print Layout in the Document Views group to change to Print Layout View.

2. Go to the final page of front matter (for example, the table of contents or any other element that appears before the main text of your e-book begins), and move the cursor to the end of the page.

You may need to add an extra line break to do this.

3. In the Page Setup group on the Page Layout tab, choose Next Page from the Breaks drop-down list, as shown in Figure 4-12.

This step splits the document into two sections.

If you can’t see the section break, turn on hidden formatting symbols by clicking the Show/Hide option (the paragraph symbol) on the Home tab of the Ribbon. You can see a section break here:

You can now create different headers and footers for the two sections. To do so, you need to unlink the sections, as described in Step 4.

4. In Print Layout view, open the header or footer on any page in Section 2, and then, on the Header & Footer Design contextual tab, click the Link to Previous button to deselect it (see Figure 4-13).

The two sections are now unlinked.

Now you can type any text you want in the header or footer on any Section 2 page without affecting Section 1 pages. For example, to add a page number, click where you want to position the page number in the header or footer. Then, in the Header & Footer group on the Insert tab, choose Current Page from the Page Number drop-down list, and select the style you prefer.