Paul Liebrand's Weblog

A really poorly styled Word document lead me to write this blog post today to rant!  Is this really that difficult?  I see it all the time – people constantly screwing around with the numbered lists in documents. They decide to re-number something but they change the number and the rest of the numbers change, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes even half of them change.

I have seen people battle with this problem for hours!  In the end, all this headache could have been avoided with about 1 minute worth of effort up front. Most people will rely on Word’s automatic numbering system to figure things out – it’s not worth the hassle… trust me!

In a new Word document, do the following:

• Click the Heading 1 style and type “Heading 1”
• Click the Heading 2 style and type “Heading 2”
• Click the Heading 3 style and type “Heading 3” (and so on)
• Click on the Define New Multilevel List button

• On the Define New Multilevel List dialog box, click the More button in the lower left corner. Select 1 on the left-top and then on the right select Heading 1 as the style to use for the level. Repeat this for all the levels you have defined (in my example, 3) and then click Ok.

Magically your document will be transformed! You will never have to mess with it again!  If you do then it means you messed something up.

Pro Tip

The default behavior when pressing Enter will change the style back to Normal.  If you want to continue the heading styles instead you can solve this easily by modifying the styles of the headings you want this behavior on.

For example, if I select the Heading 2 style and type “Heading 2” and hit enter and I want it to keep the Heading 2 style, so I can type Heading 3, etc. then simply right-click on the Heading 2 style in the styles box and select Modify. Then change the Style for following paragraph to Heading 2.

Now when I press enter, the style will stay.

If at any point, you want to adjust the settings of the multilevel list, simply right click on one of the numbers and click Adjust List Indent and you will be taken back to the multilevel list dialog box.

I don’t think this is rocket science – if it is, then I guess I am a rocket scientist!

Tags: How To, Office, Productivity, Word