*hypf*

I found that elliotth's blog has some pretty interesting articles I skimmed over some of the very old ones and came across the following: Humans pay for context switches too. It certainly made sense in some way, although I think numbering pages backwards is a bit awkward for most people.

However, I wondered whether there might be an easy way to get backwards page numbers in Word. Page numbers are just fields and you can do all kinds of fancy stuff with those. So I poked around. There was just one problem: I couldn't find where to insert a field. And that with the glorious new Office 2007 where everything is neatly organized and no cluttered menus or layers upon layers of dialogs remain (to be fair, the menus are gone, the layers of dialogs are still there, though somewhat hidden for most of the time). This marks the first time I didn't find something I looked for in Office 2007 (which I use since March 2007).

Let's take a look at the why: The Ribbon has a nice tab called „Insert“ (which is for pretty much anything that needs insertion, except citations and the like which reside in „References“ section [granted, in English it suddenly makes sense, German … not so much]), consisting of the following sections:

Of all those sections Pages, Tables, Illustrations and Symbols make no sense so I skipped them entirely. Headers & Footers might have been something because document and section titles (which frequently go into the header) and page numbers (which frequently go into the footer) are also fields, but nothing there. Links: Well, nothing here, either. Which leaves Text. Where I never bothered to look into the „Quick Parts“ drop-down which not only contains the (expected) document title, section title, author, date, etc. fields but also the more general field item:

I found that half a minute before writing this entry but about an hour after looking for it …

Funnily enough, I found it almost instantly in Word 2003:

As for the reverse page numbers, the following gets you page numbers that are counting down instead of up: {= {NumPages} – {Page} + 1}. Note that the opening and closing braces have to be entered using Ctrl+F9.