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What the heck am I doing wrong with MS Word page numbering?

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superboyac:
Word is driving me insane again.  Why does every seemingly simple task turn into a pain in the ass??

Anyway, I'm trying to do page numbering in the following way:
1) No header/footer on the first page
2) The table of contents will be numbered with small roman numerals (i, ii, iii, etc.)
3) The rest of the document will start at '1' and continue from there.

Now I had this working fine at first.  But I started fiddling around with the header/footer, and now the page numbering doesn't work anymore for some reason I can't figure out.  I can't restart the page numbering, so it's just staying as one continuous numbering system from the beginning.  I keep going to the freaking page numbering dialog box, I tell it to restart the numbering from the current position.  Does it do anything?  Of course not.  As soon as I click 'OK', nothing happens except it shifts my cursor all the way back to the top of the document (from where I was previously at in the middle somewhere).  So i don't know what the hell is happening there.

I've tried just about everything and used all the suggestions I've found on the web.  Nothing works.  Sometimes, i just hate MS Word. 

mouser:
Now I had this working fine at first.  But I started fiddling around with the header/footer, and now the page numbering doesn't work anymore for some reason I can't figure out
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Welcome to Microsoft Word!  ;D

I don't think i've ever created something in MS Word where i didn't have an experience like this with regard to something (page numbering, image text flow, section numbering, etc.); it's a consequence of so many hidden marks that you can't see, and the program trying to be "smart" and figure out what you want it to do instead of requiring you to tell it when to do something.  It can be insanely frustrating.  It's also why i end up saving-as with different filenames each time i make a non-trivial change, so i can always go back to an older version.

AndyM:
saving-as with different filenames each time i make a non-trivial change, so i can always go back to an older version
-mouser (October 26, 2010, 05:56 PM)
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golden advice!

superboyac, I feel your pain, having had experiences similar to Mousers'.  Any chance it has to do with eliminating a Section Break?  I still haven't quite gotten my head around which Section's settings prevail when you delete an adjacent Section Break.  Did you delete one when you were fooling with the headers/footers?

superboyac:
I have no idea what has happened.  If I spend another hour on it and can't fix it, I'm just going to copy/paste and redo the document from scratch.

And as far as backing up, believe me, I'm pretty well covered due to my paranoia.  I use the program Autover to back it up.  Basically, every time I modify ANYTHING (even if I just change a letter and click save), it saves a backup copy.  So I have this huge directory of an insane amount of backups in there with every little change saved as a separate file.  I realized that as soon as I started reading about Word and styles if you remember that in the other threads.  I'm just about done with that particular project at work, so if I lost it now, I think I'd blow some kind of fuse in a way I don't even want to know about.

Curt:
Maybe The WORD.MVPS Site can help you:
1) Word's numbering explained http://word.mvps.org/faqs/numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm
2) http://word.mvps.org/faqs/numbering/pagenumbering.htm
3) http://word.mvps.org/faqs/numbering/ListRestartMethods.htm
etc.

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