Microsoft Word has got to be one of the most frustrating applications on the planet.  It typically takes me hours to figure-out how to do things that I would think should be simple, such as having a document that contains portrait and landscape oriented pages which all contain a footer with consecutive page numbering.

To change one or more pages in a document from portrait to landscape orientation, select File > Page Setup… and then click the Margins tab.  If you select the This Page Forward option under the Applies To area, all pages after the current page will be rotated when you select the landscape orientation. 

That’s all well-and-good, but if you have your pages automatically numbered in the footer, switching one page to landscape orientation also creates a new Section in the document and starts page numbering over from 1. Argh!

So, what to do?  Well, where there’s help, there’s hope.  After creating a set of landscape oriented pages, select View > Headers and Footers.   Select the footer of the first landscape page and make sure the Link to Previous button is not selected. 

Figure 1: The Header and Footer Tool Bar

Then click the Format Page Number icon (the one with the # symbol and the hand as shown in Figure 1) and select Page Numbering > Continue From Previous Section radio button as shown in Figure 2. That’s it!

Figure 2: The Page Number Format Window