page numbers

[Guest]

I have a mail merger document which is a form with names filled in. It has
133 pages and word seperated each page with a section break. Problem: I
cannot figure out how to make page numbers in the footer. When I click on the
page number button from the header/footer toolbar it puts 1, then I type of
and click on the total number and it puts 1 of 133 on each page. How do I
make the page number change to 2 of 133, 3 of 133 etc. I went in to page
setup and apply to whole document and continuous instead of new page but it
doesn't work. Help

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Since mail merges are usually separate documents, Word uses the section
break and sets the page number to restart each section. Next time around, if
you do a catalog or directory merge instead of a letter merge, I think Word
does not restart the page numbers with each section.

The usual way to change this would be to click on the Format Page Number
button on the header/footer toolbar (# with hand icon), and change the radio
button from "start at" to "continue from previous section." Repeat for each
section. Using the "next header/footer" icon on the h/f toolbar will speed
this up.

With 133 sections, this seems inefficient. An alternative
suggestion--please EXPERIMENT on a COPY of the document. It doesn't seem as
though you need this document to be divided into sections, as you want it to
be all one document. Are there columns or anything in the doc? *IF* the
*only* section breaks in the document are the ones that Word put in to
separate the merge results, you might do a Find & Replace to replace all the
section breaks with manual page breaks. To F&R such things, click More in
the F&R dialog and use the Special menu to enter the section break code in
Find and the manual page break code in Replace.

Once the section breaks are gone, the page numbering will be continuous, as
it will all be one section. You don't need to insert the page breaks if you
don't want to, you can simply leave the replace box empty to delete all
section breaks this way.