Enable Automatic Page Numbering In OpenOffice Writer

By default when you use the OpenOffice Writer application it does not have page numbering enabled (much like all other word processor applications). To enable it only takes a few clicks for some footer configuration and inserting the appropriate field. It sounds confusing but it’s actually very simple to do.

Step 1. Go to the Page Format section.

On the new document, click Format then Page. See figure 1 below.

Figure 1.

Step 2. Enable the footer and have it “always on”.

Click the Footer tab then check the box for Footer on, then click OK. See figure 2 below.

Figure 2.

Step 3. Click inside the footer to edit it.

At the bottom of your document the footer field will appear. You may have to scroll down to see this. Once you do, click inside it so your cursor is flashing within. See figure 3 for example (the footer is easily visible as it has its own border within the document).

Figure 3.

Step 4. Insert a page number field inside the footer.

Now that your cursor is inside the footer we can enter in a Page Number field. Click Insert, then Fields, then Page Number. See figure 4 for example.

Figure 4.

Step 5. Align the page number to the right.

Most people prefer to have the page number aligned to the right. Click the button to justify the text to the right at the top of Writer. See Figure 5.

Figure 5.

When finished, this is what it looks like:

For each new page, the number will increase by 1 automatically. If you’d like to test this just to try it out, click in the main body of the document (meaning not in the footer) and press CTRL+ENTER a few times. This will create a new blank page each time you do this. To undo when finished, press CTRL+Z until you get back where you were.

..and that’s it.