An organization I belong to is going to reprint a book that they originally
published in 1980.  We also wanted to make corrections as needed and to make
a text-searchable and indexed CD version of the book.  The original book was
obviously not created electronically (no electronic file existed), so we
recreated the book for our 2nd edition by scanning, OCRing, and recreating
each page in electronic format.  The book is a formatting nightmare, with
the format changing with almost every page (lots of historical documents,
articles written by different people, pictures (from 1 to 4) printed in
different areas of each page, etc...there are 68 sections within the first
80 pages).  We also wanted to keep the original "look and feel" of the
original book, and that is the bottom line as far as the decision to
manually do page numbers is concerned.  The various Word page options just
can't exactly duplicate the page number location in the original book.
Since we will be creating each page to contain exactly the same text and
format as the original page, we don't have to deal with the problem of
flowing text constantly changing it's location with respect to page number,
so the manual page number entry doesn't end up causing a problem.  I use a
separate text box set to float above all other text, so it is anchored and
stays in the same place regardless of what happens during editing of that
page.

I tried all of your suggestions (and thanks for taking the time to present
them) but none of them ended up hiding an auto-generated page number so that
it didn't print.

After some experimenting, however, I did find out how to do what I needed.

1.  Entered a continuous section break on the page prior to where I wanted
numbering to restart to correspond with the printed document page numbers.

2.  Use the Insert | Page Numbers | Format feature to designate what number
to start "my" page 1 at.

3.  Remove the Page Number from the Header/Footer as follows:  Select View |
Header and Footer; switch to footer; select the frame around the page number
showing in the footer; press Delete.

This deletes the page numbers from ALL footers, but somehow leaves the
document renumbering done in step 1 in place.  I can select any page, and
the page number shown at the far left of the status bar will agree with the
page number (for printing) entered in my document.  Hopefully (I haven't
done the final step of indexing yet) the numbers generated by the index
feature will correspond with the renumbered pages.

Hope this might help someone else with this sticky of a problem that MS
didn't really think of a direct way of doing.

Ray

If you read my problem closely, you will see that I needed to renumber the
pages so that indexing would work correctly, but I didn't want Word to print
the page numbers for me, as Word could not match the page number scheme used
in edition 1 of a book that we are duplicating.

As I  have already numbered the 230 pages manually and it is working
perfectly for my purposes (the failure I am doomed to has not occurred), I
see no reason to spend more time experimenting with Word to try and
duplicate what I have done manually, then to have to return and remove 230
separate text boxes.  Yes, it was labor intensive, but we have duplicated
the original where MSWord could not, so we have achieved our goal.

I am familiar with headers/footers and their implementation.  I read all of
the articles you quoted and many more for about 2 hours in trying to find a
solution to my situation before I posted my question to the newsgroup.

There are actually times when MS just doesn't have all the (quick) answers,
although I did use the Word Help file description on how to remove page
numbers and then found out (to my satisfaction) that the page renumbering
had remained, which solved my problem perfectly.