by RoryOF » Thu Nov 22, 2018 4:09 pm
See, firstly, just which page styles you are using. Use /Format /Styles and Formatting, press 4th icon from left to display Page Styles, them select "Applied Styles" from the dropdown in the bottom bar of that window. It may be sufficient to right click on the front matter pages styles and select Modify, then turn off the checkbox to use footer on the Footer tab.
However, if you are getting footers to all pages when you insert a footer to a text page, then your page styles are not all they should be; it might be simpler if you dummied the text - replace all characters with x - and uploaded the file to the Forum, so we can see what has gone wrong. (Find and Replace, Find . (full stop), replace x, drop More Options and select Regular Expressions, press Replace all. Do this ONLY on a COPY of your file, or you will lose all your work. You have been warned!)
How do you start a Chapter - on its own page, typically a Right page? Usually no need for a running page header if so, and page number might be inserted centred in a footer. Other text pages can typically be left page Heater containing page number and book name, right page header containing Chapter title and page number. Back matter of Appendices, Bibliography, Index etc is typically set as the text pages, with similar running headers and page numbers, with Chapter titles replaced by Appendix or Index etc (as appropriate). Blank padding pages at the end, inserted to cope bring the page count up to the desired multiple are left blank.
Apache OpenOffice 4.1.8 on Xubuntu 20.04.1 (mostly 64 bit version) and very infrequently on Win2K/XP