You have a document that requires Roman numerals in one section and Arabic numerals in another. What do you do? No worries.
Word makes changing number styles easy with section breaks. First, a caveat: Before writing any long document, be sure to acquire
the template for it from your instructor, department, or school, especially for theses and disserations. That said, this
page numbering technique works for any document regardless of length or complexity. OK. Here we go. Step One:
Scroll through your document and determine where the page numbering changes. Most often, the two main sections are:
Front Matter and Body. Front matter consists of any page that comes before the Body: Front matter can include the title page,
abstract, acknowledgements, table of contents, list of abbreviations, and so on. Again, you should be working from your instructor’s
or school’s template. The five pages of front matter in this document are its: title page, abstract, acknowledgements, table of
contents., and list of abbreviations put in the order specified by this school. The next section is the body. Body pages are numbered
sequentially to the end. Sometimes in disserations or articles for publication, there is a third section of back matter. Back matter
can include any supplemental material such as data sets, supplemental figures and tables, audio and visual digital information.
This sample document has no back matter. So, page numbering ends with the references page. OK. Let’s start numbering our document
at the title page. It’s the first page of our front matter and we’re told to use Roman numerals. No problem. Go to Insert, then Page Number.
In the dropdown menu, select format page numbers. In the dialog box that appears, change the style to Roman numerals.
Now click on Insert > page number again and select Top or Bottom, left, middle or right alignment. For this school, I’m told to use top of
page, right aligned. There! Our Roman numeral one appears. But wait! you say. There shouldn’t be a page number on the title page.
That’s usually true. However, Word will always recognize the first page of any document as page one. Your choice is to make it an
implied page number only by clicking on “Different First Page” in the Options tab. The number on the title page disappears.
And, as we scroll, down. we see that the pages of front matter are numbered consequetively in the upper right. Your next step is to insert a
section break between the front matter and the body of your document. First, we need to turn on formatting marks. Go
to File > and all the way down to Options. In the window that appears, select Display and then Show All Formatting Marks, and OK.
Go to the last page of the front matter, which in this document is the List of Abbreviations. Activate your cursor before the last Paragraph
symbol on the page. Then click on the Layout tab, then on the Breaks dropdown menu. Under Section Breaks, select Next Page.
The break is added and note that an extra paragraph character may have been inserted. If so, Delete it. Now activate your cursor in the
Header/Footer area. At the break between Section 1 and Section 2, look on the right side for “Same as Previous.” This is Word’s default
and must be changed. You don’t want the two sections to be the same. You want to start new and different page numbering.
So, in the Navigation grouping, look for Link to Previous. You want to disable this link by clicking on it once. Now you can begin new
page numbering. With your cursor in the header or Footer area, go to Insert, Page Number, Format Page Numbers. Change the
style to Arabic numerals. At the bottom of the dialog box, under Page Numbering, click on Start At: and enter in 1 to begin numbering your
body pages. That’s it! If you have any back matter, follow the same procedure of creating a new section.
Good luck and let me know if I can help you going forward!