If you want to apply page numbering in a Word document leaving some of the starting pages without page numbers, here is what you need to do.

1) Go to the (top of) the page where you want numbering to start. This can be whatever page of your document – the third, fourth, sixteenth…, anything.

2) Insert a “Next Page” Section Break (“Page Layout” menu > “Breaks” > “Next Page”)

3) Place the cursor somewhere in the new section you just created, and insert Page Numbers (“Insert” menu > “Page Number”)

4) Unlink your new section from the previous one (Go to “Print Layout” view, if you are not already, and double click a page number of your new section. Press the “Unlink” button from the top menu bar. Go to the “Insert” menu > “Page Number” > “Format Page Number” and select the “Start at 1” option.)

5) Go to the previous section of your document, double click on a page number and delete it. Page numbering will be removed from all the pages of the that section.

Of course, all of this trouble would not be necessary, if the geniuses at Microsoft understood how common this way of numbering is, particularly in scholarly documents, and just had an option to “start page numbering from this page”, even with sub-options “leave without numbering all the pages above the current one”, or “change numbering format (e.g. in latin) for all pages before the current one” etc.