Automating Footers and Page Numbers

Earlier we talked about Paragraph styles. OpenOffice.org also has Page styles, where you can assign page properties such as margins, headers, footers, and page numbers. The status bar shows the page style of the current page.

The status bar shows the current page style (Default in this case).

Here, the page has the Default page style. To add a footer, select Insert > Footer > Default. When the footer appears, you can click it and type text, insert images, and so on.

A page with a footer.

The footer appears on every page with the same page style (in this case, Default). To insert a page number, select Insert > Fields > Page Number.

The page number field.

The page number updates automatically and appears on every page with this page style. The gray background means that it is a field and not regular text. When you print the document, the background is the same as the rest of the document. You can turn the gray background on and off with View > Field Shadings.