I have tried to follow the advice I’ve found already but its not working. I have the 7.2 version and using HP gaming laptop Victus with an AMD Ryzen OS I believe. So as you can see I’m not techy and have little skill.
If you really expect useful help, help us to help you.
Which one? Is it this one?
Please, edit your question to provide more details. Mention your OS name and LO version. Writer evolves with time and there are differences between releases. Also, give some hint about your skills with Writer. Are you familiar with styles?
No I’m not familiar with styles. I can’t find anything that works on here or elsewhere, I can’t believe its this hard.
@adamj ,
everyone has started once 
Please, open LibreOffice.
Select Help>About LibreOffice from the menu.
Click on the button at “Version Information”.
This saves the information below it to the clipboard.
Go to your initial question here and click Edit.
At the end of the text, paste the content from the clipboard (Ctrl+V).
Thank you.
It is hard only because you’re in the unknown. Using a document processor is not the same as using pen and paper. To avoid bad surprises (and ranting afterwards), begin to forget everything you think you know about writing documents. Don’t trust “intuitive behaviour”. “Intuitive” is a word to hide yourself behind your previous routine.
At least, read the Writer Guide. Unfortunately, it is not a tutorial and you’ll find reading it a bit disappointing and boring. But at least, it describes quite well what you can do with Writer.
Writer is based on styles. Study carefully the chapters dedicated to styles. Manual formatting (names direct formatting in the menus) is offered only for switchers from Word where you have no other solution. But be aware that manual formatting leads to “formatting nightmare”, i.e. the quasi-impossibility to tune centrally and comfortably your formatting and layout.
Please, tell us which advice you’ve found and which part didn’t work. It’ll probably be easier to follow on from something you’ve attempted rather than try to explain from scratch.
By the way, AMD Ryzen is a microprocessor not an operating system. I assume from difficulty to describe your context that you’re under Windows by default.
I followed everything in this link, How to start page numbering on a certain page but I had one sentence per page with over 1800 pages. So as you say I’m forgetting any routine or ideas I have by trying it as advised but this is the result.
I select the footer, insert page number which then gives the same number to all and also when I change them individually.
By right clicking paragraph then paragraph again, then text flow, then insert under breaks, then page style then number leads to the above problem.
I haven’t found any other way of trying this.
@ajlittoz : To be honest, the name “manual break” still strikes me as particularly misleiding after working with OpenOffice for some 20 years. What’s more manual than pressing Ctrl+Enter?
For the rest, concur.
Page numbering is a property of page styles. Consequently if you want pages without a number and pages with a number, you need at least two page styles: one for the first pages without number and another one for the part with numbers, supposing that your document has this simple structure.
If your unnumbered part is reduced to the cover page, your case simplifies to using built-in styles:
- First Page for the cover page
- Default Page Style for the rest of the document
First Page is specially configured to automatically switch to Default Page Style at the end of the first page. The procedure is:
- put the cursor in the first page
- in the style side pane, page style view (+), double-click on First Page
You’re done.
(+) The side pane should be displayed by default. If it is not, menu Styles>Manage Styles or F11. In case the side pane doesn’t list styles, press the button with a T (second from top in the right icon bar. Since styles belong in many categories, you must select the appropriate one in the pane toolbar. Page styles are selected by the icon looking like a page fourth from left).
With a prologue of several unnumbered pages, you must create a custom page style.
- right-click anywhere in the list, preferentially below the names, and
New - give a name to your style, i.e. Unnumbered Pages in
Organizertab - adjust paper size and margins in
Pageso that it has the same “geometry” as the rest of the document - press OK
Put the cursor in any unnumbered page and double-click on Unnumbered Pages. The whole document is now formatted by *Unnumbered Pages. You must add a boundary to tell Writer where Unnumbered Pages should stop.
Put the cursor in the paragraph which should be the very first of the numbered pages. You probably have already inserted a page break. Remove this page break.
- with the cursor still in this first paragraph, menu
Insert>More Breaks>Manual Break - in the pop-up dialog, select Default Page Style from Page Style: drop-down menu
- it is likely you want the numbered pages to start at 1; for that, tick the Change page number checkbox and enter the page number (1) in the entry field
Page number in footer
- make sure footer is enabled in Default Page Style; if not go to
Footertab of the page style (right-click on name in the style side pane andModify) - click in the footer area to put the cursor in the footer
-
Insert>Field>Page Number