Add page numbers to MS Word by Default

This is going to be going to be pretty quick and pretty helpful if you're like me and would always rather see page numbers on a word document rather than not having them.

Go to your Office Template folder here:

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%AppData%\Microsoft\Templates

Find Normal.dot or Normal.dotm

Right click and select open. We want to make sure we're editing the template, not using it to create a brand new document. You should see Normal.dot in the Word title bar. If that doesn't work, you can try opening up a new word document and opening the template from there.

Then simply insert page numbers and save

Next time you open up a document it will have page numbers by default.

You can read more about this at Change the Normal template