Microsoft Word offers an easy way to add different styles of page numbers to your document. If you’ve got a simple document, it works well enough. But if you’ve worked with Word for a while and use it to create more complex documents, you know page numbering can get a little flaky. So let’s take a closer look.
How to Insert Page Numbers
To add page numbers to your Word document, switch over to the “Insert” tab on the Ribbon and then click the “Page Number” button in the “Header & Footer” section.
A drop-down menu shows several different options for where you’d like the page numbers to appear—top of the page, bottom of the page, and so on. The last couple of options let you format your page numbers more precisely (something we’ll look at a bit later in this article) or remove page numbers from your document.
Hover over one of the first four options and a page number gallery appears. Each option in the gallery gives you a general idea of how the page numbers will look on your page.
Once you find an option you like, go ahead and click it to have Word automatically number all the pages of your document in that style. In this example, we’ve selected the “Accent Bar” style in the “Page X” format.