You must first understand a few important differences between M$ Word and LO Writer. Writer is heavily based on "styles". They are everywhere to provide consistent "repeatable" models for document entities.
One of the styles category is page style. It defines all intrinsic properties of a page: orientation, margins, background, header, footer, ...
Header and footer will be repeated on every page. This is where page numbers "naturally" belongs. Consequently, you must first enable header or footer on page style definition.
- display the style side pane with
F10
and click on the fourth small icon (the one with a small page figure - Page Styles) right-click on the desired page style and choose Modify
In your case it is likely you use only a single style, i.e. Default Style.
go to the Footer
tab and enable footer, checking Header on
- click
OK
Next, put the cursor in the footer area (it is easier to see the exact footer location if you View
>Formatting Marks
or >Nonprinting Marks
in older versions) and Insert
>Fields
>Page Number
.
Tune the layout to your taste as you would for any paragraph. The best way is to customise paragraph style Footer.
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