I have a document that needs footers edited. It needs to be page numbered. I need the first two pages to NOT show a footer, yet the third page to have the footer reflect page 3, and so on from there. I can't seem to find anything besides removing the footer on the first page.
1 Answer
Adapting this answer to How can I have different text in the footer on every page of a Word document?:
- Edit the footer.
Copy the following text:
IF PAGE > 2 "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
into the footer. Replace the “lazy dog” sentence with the text that you want to include starting on page 3. It can be multiple lines. If you want it to include the dynamic page number, type the word
PAGE
, then select it and press Ctrl+F9. This will convert the wordPAGE
into a page number field, which will temporarily add{
and}
to the display, resulting in something like this:{ PAGE }
(I don’t know what to do if your footer contains literal quote characters, or non-text elements like images.)
- Select the word
PAGE
(at the beginning) and press Ctrl+F9. Select the entire phrase and press Ctrl+F9. This will convert those strings to fields, and, consequently, add (more)
{
and}
characters, resulting in something like this:{ IF { PAGE } > 2 "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." }
- Right-click on the
IF
and select “Toggle Field Codes”. - If there’s anything that you want in the footer on every page, add it now.
- Close the footer.
Explanation
(In case any is needed)
Basically, this is Microsoft Word’s implementation of the IF
-THEN
-ELSE
construct
that is common in programming languages, as in
IF Todays’s date is 1 THEN Today is Monday ELSE IF Todays’s date is 2 THEN Today is Tuesday ELSE IF Todays’s date is 3 THEN Today is Wednesday ELSE Here comes the weekend! END IF
Generally, they can all be nested (as shown in this answer).