I’ve heard this complaint many times – “I am trying to print a page or page range from a word documents and it is printing completely different pages or doesn’t print anything at all.”

This problem is almost always caused by a multi-section document with different page numbering in at least one of the sections.

For example, let’s say you have 10 page document with page numbering in the footer. Printing is working as expected. If you insert a Section Brake (Page Layout > Breaks > Sections Breaks) at the end of page 5, you will have a document with two sections, but printing will still work as expected. Now, double click on the footer in page 6 (first page in second section) and click on Page Number > Format Page Numbers. In the dialog box Page Numbering section select Start at: 1 and click OK. This will rest page numbering for section 2.
Now page numbers will go up to 5, then from second section, will start from 1 again. This page numbering is not only what you see in the footer, but what Word will use for printing. What confuses most users is that in the status bar pages numbers will be displayed 1 to 10 as before . But if you now try to print page no 7, nothing will be printer, because as far as Word is concerned page 7 doesn’t exist. What you expect to be page 7 (and what is displayed in the status bar as page 7) is actually page 2 in section 2.

To print page(s) from multiple section document you need to specify both page and section. This is done in format p<page number>s<section number>. In the example above, to print second page in second section, you would enter p3s2. You can also do ranges, for example p5s1-p2s2.

In Word 2010 section numbers are displayed in the status bar, next to the page numbers. If Section is not displayed right-click on the status bar and select Section