In a Microsoft Word document, if you want the cover page and table of contents to be without page numbers, and the page numbers are displayed from the body of the text, you can do so by following these steps:
First, you'll need to create different sections for your document. This is because Word allows you to set different headers and footers for different sections, including page numbers.
Cover and table of contents are sub-sections: Place the cursor at the end of the table of contents, or where the body of text begins. Then, go to the "Layout" or "Page Layout" tab, click on "Separator" or "Section Break", and select "Next". This creates a new section between the table of contents and the body.
Next, add page numbers in the body section (section 2).
Go to the "Insert" tab and click on "Page Number".
Choose the page number position and style you want.
Once you've added a page number, double-click the footer or header area to edit the page number.
In order for the cover and table of contents to be unnumbered, you need to break the body section from the header and footer links of the previous section (cover and table of contents).
In the header or footer area of the first page of the body (i.e., the section where you added the page number), you'll see the option to "Link to previous section", make sure to uncheck it. In this way, the header and footer of the body section are no longer synchronized with the cover and table of contents sections.
Going back to the section where the cover and table of contents are located, if the page numbers were automatically added before, you can now delete them directly, because the header and footer of this section are already unlinked from the body part.
If you want to renumber the pages from the body (e.g., from 1), in the first header or footer area of the body (i.e., the second section):
Select Page Number > Format Page Number.
In the Page Number Format dialog box, you can select Start At and enter the page number you want to start with, usually 1.
Different versions of Word (e.g. Word 2016, Word 2019, Office 365) may operate slightly differently, but the basic principle is the same.
Make sure to save the document before doing it to prevent data loss due to careless operation.
With the above steps, you can easily remove page numbers for the cover page and table of contents in a Word document, and display and control the page numbers from the body of the text.