Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I have followed the instructions to set a starting page number for a document by clicking into the first paragraph, choosing Format > Paragraph > Text flow, and in the Breaks area enabling Insert and With Page Style, setting the page number to 275 and then finally clicking OK.

The document has the starting page number 275 at this time. However, when I save it as a .doc file and reopen it with Open Office Writer, the starting page number is 19. If I save the document as a .odt file and reopen it with Open Office Writer, the starting page number is 275. The really confusing thing is when I open the .doc file in Microsoft Works Word Processor, the starting page number is 275.

Using Open Office Writer, how can I see the correct page number "275" on the first page of the document I saved in .doc format?

I doubt you can. 19+256 = 275. This is obviously some form of arithmetic problem. You could try Saving from MS Works and see if that file is any better in Mr Word.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it but that made no difference whatsoever.

Please remember that the .doc format is a proprietary one, not designed to be compatible with anything else than MS Office.
If you need to work with .doc, then stick to MS Word.

It's a bug in the AOO import filter. LO shows the correct page number.

Issue 50334 - WW8: Page number starting higher than 255 not handled by import

Thanks for the information. This bug did not exist a few versions ago when I was able to create documents with starting page numbers above 255 and save them in .doc format; when I reopened them in past versions the page numbers displayed correctly. The problem began in a relatively recent version, but I don't know which one.

Do you or anyone else have any idea as to when this problem will be fixed?

The problem was reported in 2005, so it has been around since before OOo 2. I doubt that anyone is working on the issue.

Thanks again, Bill. I appreciate your taking the time to answer my questions. I guess not enough people have this problem to justify anyone working on a fix. Now that I understand the issue better, I will just save all my files with starting page numbers over 255 in .odt format.

DavTon505 wrote:Using Open Office Writer, how can I see the correct page number "275" on the first page of the document I saved in .doc format?

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for why you should always work in and save files as .odt.

It discusses page style and page numbering problems which arise when you save as a .doc which do not happen when you save as a .odt.