Video: Mirrored margins and cover pages

This video explains how to insert a cover page that works with mirrored margins. Plus, we'll show you how to fix your page numbers too.

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Set page margins

My top margin is missing

Change the margins of a text box or shape

We have set our mirrored margins and our page numbering. Now, let’s put a title page at the beginning.

Okay, you see, on the first page, I have the cover page content up here already, and then the rest of my document continues on.

I want to separate these two things.

So, I am going to insert my cursor there, and then I am going to go up to PAGE LAYOUT, and then click Breaks and then Page.

And now I have a nice separation between the cover page and the rest of the document.

Now, there is a common convention in books that people are used to.

Most books have a cover, and then when you open that cover, there’s a blank page on the left, and then your content begins over here, on the right.

So, how do you do that in Word if you want that? I’ll show you.

You don’t use that Page Break we put in a second ago.

So I’ll go ahead and I’ll scroll up here.

And I’m going to turn on paragraph marks, so I can see what I’m doing.

Go to the HOME tab, and then click the Show/Hide Paragraph Mark.

Okay? Here’s that page break, and we are going to hit the Backspace key to delete that.

Okay, so instead of a page break, we are going to put in a section break here.

We are going to go up here to PAGE LAYOUT, choose Breaks, and then under Section Breaks, we are going to click Odd Page.

Now, clicking this option is going to do three things: The first thing it is going to do is put a break underneath that first cover page, and then, it is going to move the content under that break over to the next odd page, and in this case the third page.

And it will also, then, put that blank page in there.

So, let’s go ahead and do that.

We’ll click Odd Page.

And there we go, our cover page is on Page 1, and then the rest of the content starts here on Page 3.

Now, you might be wondering, hey, where would that blank page go that you mentioned a second ago? Well it is there. It is just not visible in this view.

So we’ll go over to print preview, and we’ll do that here by going over to FILE and Print.

And, we have got our cover page here, on Page 1. We’ll scroll down, and there is that blank page.

And then, the rest of our content begins here on the next odd page, Page 3.

Now, the only thing you may want to fix here, is you might want to not have a page number here on the cover, right? Because most covers don’t have a page number down there.

So we’ll want to remove that. And then we’ll probably want this first page of content to start on Page 1.

So let’s fix that, we’ll go over here, and we will scroll down here to this footer.

And notice that this footer says, Same as Previous right here.

That means this footer is inheriting the settings of the cover page above it, alright?

So, we don’t want that, in this particular case, so we are going to turn that feature off. And the way we do that is we go up here, and we unselect Link to Previous, and then we change the format of this page number.

We select it and then right-click it, choose Format Page Numbers, and we Start at 1.

Okay? And there, that’s exactly what we want.

And then, we just simply remove this page number here in the cover page. So, we’ll just press the Backspace a couple of times, and then get out of that.

And then, always check your work in print preview.

So, we’ll go over here to FILE, Print and then here we are, the cover page has no page number, and when we scroll down, there is that blank page, and then, the content begins over here on Page 1.

And, of course, the page numbers continue on from there.

For more information on mirrored margins, page numbers, and section breaks, see the course summary.