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Formatting Guides for APA Papers

Inserting Page Numbers

Double click in the area of your page where the header will be. This will bring up the design tab. For the front matter, you will not have page numbers on the title page, so you will want to start by checking the box for "Different First Page." This will allow you to insert page numbers on the second page without them appearing on the title page.

 

Make sure your cursor is in the header of the second page of the document. On the top left side of your screen, in Word, click on the Page Numbers box then click "Format Page Numbers..." From here, we can select the format we need.

Example photo of Microsoft word, selecting page numbers and choosing to format them

In this case, we'll begin with lower-case Roman numerals and choose what page they start at. For this example, we will input "ii" Into the starting page, meaning that the page numbers will begin with "ii."

Example of the page number formatting box in Word, lowercase Roman Numerals selected beginning at 2

Once you've made the formatting changes you'd like to see, the page numbers will not appear immediately. To insert your formatted numbers, navigate back to the Page Number dropdown menu under your header's design tab. Hover over Top of Page, then click Plain Number 3 to insert page numbers in the top right corner of each page. 

The next section of this guide will cover breaks in more depth, but using a section break here can allow us to change the formatting on our page numbers. First. create a new section break by clicking Layout at the top of your page, then click Breaks, then Next Page under the section breaks tab. 

Example photo of how to insert a section break on the next page. The layout, break and next page boxes are highlighted.

Double click in the header of the new section's first page and ensure the "Link to Previous" box at the top is not highlighted, clicking on it if it is. If this were to stay highlighted, changes you make in the new section's headers would also be made in the previous section.

Example from Microsoft Word of how to properly remove previous section linking in the header of a document

Because the first section requires a "Different First Page" this choice may still be checked in your new section. You will want page numbers on the first page of the body of the thesis, so you will need to make sure that this is not checked.

image showing that having the box "different first page" checked is wrong and that it should not be checked

 

 

You can select the formatting options you'd like to apply again, this time starting at 1 in Arabic numerals. This will only change the new section's page numbers and should not affect the previous section. 

Example of setting arabic numerals as page numbers on a document