I have a front page that is not a part of the document and therefor shouldn’t be counted as page 1.
I’ve change the page style to “First page” and changed the “Format” from “1,2,3…” to “None”.
Problem is that the page is still being seen as page 1.
How do I make it not get counted?
It IS a page. So, Writer will see it as a page. If you put a chapter heading there, it will become part of a document wide ToC.
To avoid having the front matter included in a ToC, I can see two approaches:
- Use the Heading 1 paragraph style for main sections (front matter, main content, end matter) and Heading 2 for chapter headings. Select the option to make ToC for chapter.
- Use the Title paragraph style (or other styles without an elevated outline level) for front matter.
To have the beginning page for main book content seen as page 1, Insert a manual page break and set page number to 1.
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough, since you spent time on “headings”.
The “set page as page 1” was all I needed to search and found out the rest.
Most of the answers I’ve come across are to do an offset -1 on page number fields.
Thank you very much 
Never, never, never* (it should be written seven times) offset a page number when in fact you want to number pages. The offset parameter is intended for special cases. Unless you understand what is at stake, you risk to get an “empty” page number! The offset parameter is meant to reference a page further remote than previous/next (offset ±1). If the page does not exist, the returned value is “void”.