Sexah page numbers

I find page numbers to be so under-appreciated. Especially in Microsoft Word. My office actually usually uses WordPerfect, except when a client specifically requests a Word document. I can hear you out there–I scoffed at WordPerfect too when I was hired, but now I’m a believer. I formatted my thesis in Word, even, and I still write my fiction in it because my fingers are faster on Word keyboard shortcuts than an Old West gunslinger. But try to format a whole document with half a dozen sections, different footers, appendices, figures, and automatic chapter numbers in headings in Word and then WordPerfect, then come talk to me.

(The secret, for the curious, is that WordPerfect lets you see all of the code. So where in Word you’ll randomly click your cursor farther down the page and suddenly everything’s bold, two points bigger, and in a different font because there’s a style code where you can’t see it or touch it, no matter how much you delete around, in WordPerfect you open the code box and look around for [Open style] and delete the bastard.)

Anyway, today, as you might have guessed, I was formatting in Word. I had three sets of page numbers: i-iv, 1-22, and A-1-4 (for the appendix). The fact that I ended up with all of those instead of i-iv, 1-26, or [blank]-[blank], A-1-26 was a minor miracle, requiring a serious span of concentrated effort. But of course no one looking at the document will appreciate how sexy that 1-22 really is. 🙁