laxonator Wrote:
is there a way that i can mark the first page as a cover page and have
it not count as a page for the auto page number? as in, can i offset
the pages after the first page by (-1). please help, i hope there's a
way to do this. thanks!

Hi laxonator,

Reducing the page number by one is actually quite easy to do. If you
select your document's page number field and press Shift-F9, its field
code should expand to give you something like:
{PAGE}
If you select the whole of this field and press Ctrl-F9, you'll enclose
the existing field inside a new one, with the coding looking like:
{ {PAGE} }
Note: You cannot simply type these braces in - they must be input as
described.
Edit the field to look like:
{={PAGE}-1}
If you now press F9 to update the result, your page numbers will be
reduced by one and your cover page will now display a zero. So, we need
to make one more modification to suppress the 0 display. That is, we
need to add a numeric picture switch. To do this, modify the field so
that it looks like:
{={PAGE}-1 \# 0;;}

Numeric picture switches accept three display options: +ve, -ve and 0,
each separated by a semi-colon. Here, the '0;;' tells Word to display
+ve values only, as unformatted values.

If you now press F9 to update the result, your page numbers will be
reduced by one and your cover page will not display the zero.

Cheers
PS: I hope this is better late than never ...


--
macropod