When it comes to opting for an office suite to carry out our work on writing documents, spreadsheets or presentations, the most used is undoubtedly Microsoft Office. However, there are more proposals on the market, many of them free and online that we can use very effectively and without installing any software on the PC. This is the case of Google Docs, whose word processor does not have to envy other commercial applications.
If you’re used to using Google Docs, you’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t automatically include page numbers in the documents you’re working on while writing. Of course, we must know that this option is only available for the Google Document tool, since neither spreadsheets nor slides are compatible with this function.
For people who work with large and lengthy documents, a page number symbol can save a lot of hassle and speed up the typing process. While you can always enter page numbers in a document manually, the fact is that the Google Docs tool offers its users the ability to add automatic page numbers, which will save us a considerable amount of time.
List all Google Docs pages
The first thing we must do is access the Google office automation platform and open the document in which we want to integrate these elements. Once the document is open, click on the Insert tab that we find in its upper toolbar. This will open a context menu where we will select the Number of pages option. Here we find a pop-up window in which we can choose the page number style that we are going to carry out.
Specifically, we will see four different options that refer to the way in which the page numbers will appear in the open document.
- Top Left: This is responsible for placing the page numbers in the top right corner of the page, starting from the first page.
- Bottom Left: In this case, place the page numbers in the bottom right corner of the page, starting from the first page.
- Upper right : if we select it, it takes care of placing the numbers in the upper right corner, but skips the first page and the numbering starts from the second page onwards. This will cause the second page of your document to be numbered as page one, the third page as page two, and so on. It is an interesting option if our document has a title page that we do not want to list.
- Bottom Right: This option also takes care of skipping the first page and starting on the second, but in this case, it puts the page numbers in the bottom right corner.
We simply have to select the option that most interests us to add it to our document that will be updated immediately according to the chosen option.
move page numbers
Once we have included the page number, we will verify that Google Docs only allows us to place them at the top or bottom right of each page. However, it is also possible to add page numbers to the left or center.
To be able to carry out this movement we must make sure that we have chosen one of the two upper options if we want the numbers at the top, or one of the lower options if we want them located at the bottom. Later we will double click on the header or footer that we are going to edit depending on where the page number is.
Next, from the toolbar we click on Align to the left or Align to the center , depending on what interests us, and in this way the numbering will move to the new selected location.
It is also possible to change the appearance of the page numbers . To do this, we select a page number and in the toolbar we can change both its font, as well as the color of the text and its size.
If at any time we decide that we no longer wish to display page numbers in the document, we can remove this numbering. To do this, it will only be necessary to select any page number and then press the DELETE key on our keyboard.
Skip to the first page
In the event that we want to include the first page in our page count, but in this case, we would like to be able to hide the page number of the document, we can do so by making a simple configuration adjustment.
To do this, we are going to first click on the Insert tab of the toolbar to place the cursor on the Page Numbers option. Now, in the drop-down menu on the right we are going to choose the More options section.
In the event that we want to omit the first page, we will uncheck the Show on the first page box and click Apply to save the changes
Now automatically, the pages of our document are numbered from page two onwards.
How to add a page count
There are times where the individual page number may not be sufficient and a separate document may lose some pages at the end. In this case, it might be interesting to have the possibility of adding a page count to our header, which allows us to know for sure, not only which page of the document we are on, but also how many pages the document includes in total.
That is why, if the document needs to specify the number of pages in it, it will be possible to add a page count. This page count will update automatically each time pages are added or removed from the document.
To do this, the first thing we are going to do is select a relevant place in the document. Then click on the Insert tab on the toolbar and then click on the Page number section and finally select Page numbers. This will add the total number of pages that will appear in the location we have selected.
