Multilevel numbering and a Table of Contents

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Word 2007

I am creating a long strategic document with multilevel numbering and a Table of Contents.

I have everything set up with Styles, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.

I am having a hard time getting all the indents to work and line up and the fonts keep changing for the numbers.

If I am creating an Outline type numbered list (multilevel numbering), how can I set it up all at once in a List Style so that all the indents and hanging indents are correct?

What controls the Style of the numbers on the multilevel numbered lists – the Headings or Font under Paragraph or what???

Is nothing in the Paragraph section like there is on the Styles section that says Select all XX Instances or Update to Match Selection?

It is confusing about directly changing and what is in the List Style and then what is in the TOC formatting.

If I need to move things around, how do I correct it?

How can I know exactly how far on the ruler an indent or hanging indent it is?

I thought I named a new list style (multilevel), but now I do not see any of them named! There are no names under Current List or List Library or Lists in Current Documents, just those unhelpful pictures of the outlines.

I seem to find anomalies and try to fix them without making it a permanent change to my List Style. It’s blurry to me between the Heading Styles and numbered List Styles and who controls what.

Why does the numbering end up like this sometimes?

10.1 Value Proposition for charging annual fees (Heading 1)
3.2.1 Evaluate tiered approach (Heading 2)
12.11.1.1 Financial or in-kind contributions (Heading 3)

My outline numbering shows up in the Styles section for the various headings. But sometimes the Styles ribbon fonts for the various Styles look different from what I have designated them to be! Where should I control the indents from? Style or Paragraph Multilevel Numbering?

If the numbering gets messed up, which steps should I take to correct it?

Styles, Headings, Paragraph Multilevel list???

Right click on the number itself and I get a box called Set Numbering, in which it says Start New List, Continue from previous List, Advance value (skip numbers), Set Value to: ___ ___, Preview X.X., OK, Cancel.

This never seems to accomplish what I try to get it to do! Sometimes, my numbers and indents and fonts in my document seem all random. If I fix them, through trial and error, they never seem to stick!

Can someone please go through the sequence. I’ve been going through ALL the MS Word online help and I cannot find anything that addresses this rather complicated case. Or maybe my file is corrupted. But I am seen other posts with similar concerns about bugs, etc.

Thanks for any fog you can clear up for me!

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Okay, I just found an earlier post on multilevel numbering from Jan and will read this carefully:

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Multilevel list numbering is very confusing. The article by BEC Legal should help, but you might have to read it a few times to get the gist of it.

As for indents in the generated TOC, the formatting for each heading level is determined by a TOC style separate from the actual heading styles you’re using in the document. There will be, for example, a TOC 1 style for level 1 headings, a TOC 2 style for level 2 headings, a TOC 3 style for level 3 headings, etc. In order to change the way the headings appear when you generate the TOC, you will need to modify individual TOC styles. To do so, display the Styles Pane — click the dialog launcher at the bottom of the Styles group on the Home tab or press Ctrl Alt Shift S — then locate and right-click the style you want to change, click “Modify,” and make any changes (use the “Format” button at the lower left side of the Modify Style dialog and then click Tabs or Paragraph or whatever in order to adjust the settings). Before closing the Modify Style dialog, click the “New documents based on this template” button in order to make sure your changes will affect all new documents based on the underlying template, and then click OK.

You’ll have to do that for each TOC style you wish to change. You can keep tweaking the settings for an individual style to your heart’s content, but just be sure to click “New documents based on this template” each time before you OK out of the Modify Style dialog, or the changes you make will affect only the document on your screen, not all future documents.

I hope this is helpful to you. Good luck!

Jan

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Jan & any others,

I read the BEC article and was able to follow it until the part about the Quick Style Set. I saved my multilevel list, but then didn’t know how to find it or apply it again. Also, I don’t think my Tab and Shift Tab work. When following the BEC example, I created three levels of text and then had to place my cursor on the first letter of each line, go to the Multilevel Gallery, select the List Styles I had created and named 20Aug09 (now I see that the name only appears in a floating box when you put your cursor on the List), and then select Change List Level. Is this really the convoluted process I have to go through? (see attached file)

I don’t think mine is ROCK Solid yet!

1. What do I do now if I need to change the first line text indent for 1)? (I should change my list style?)
2. What do I do if I want to change the numbering system to 1., 1.1, 1.11? (I should change my list style?)
3. What if I want to change the font of the numbers? (Do I change list or paragraph?)
4. What are the wrap settings in a list?
5. How do I apply a list to a paragraph? Do I need to highlight the whole paragraph and then go to the Multilevel list gallery?
6. When BEC talks about paragraph style, do they mean Home/Styles?

I am just amazed that Word designed this so that only rocket scientists or elite PhD students or highly sophisticated legal or scientific document specialists can handle it! And I am none of the above.

Thanks for all your descriptions, although I already know how to do the TOCs and modify the styles. I just didn’t (don’t fully) understand how it is related to List styles formatting and paragraph styles formatting.

Thank you for any light you can shed further.
Kind regards,
Karin

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Dear Loungers, I was so excited to find Woody’s Lounge, that I jumped into it without due caution (a cardinal sin). But now I just read the Rules and Guidelines and think I violated at least one rule by posting into general Word a topic that has already been covered elsewhere. I apologize. Hope this doesn’t prevent me from learning more and finding some more answers here as I trudge through my document challenges. I am hoping to find support on this site over the next few weeks on these formatting issues for multilevel numbering and Table of Contents because I have asked everyone I know locally, and it is beyond them. I would also love to include a bibliography, but everything I read says it’s not worth using the Word Version. I already have a bibliography typed into a normal numbered list which is probably good enough. I am using footnotes. Best regards, Karin

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Hi Karin,

Welcome to the Lounge!

Don’t worry, you haven’t violated any of our rules. Although we do appreciate it of course if you search before asking, you’re free to ask any questions here, whether simple or complicated!

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Hi Karin,

Welcome to the Lounge!

Don’t worry, you haven’t violated any of our rules. Although we do appreciate it of course if you search before asking, you’re free to ask any questions here, whether simple or complicated!

Hi, HansV,
Thank you! I still await any answers to the questions in my Post#4, but I don’t know if my doc was correctly attached? If not, should I attach again in a new post or go back and edit post#4 and upload it there? It’s just a small (14K) sample .docx file.
Karin

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There was no file attached to post #4, but you did attach it correctly to #8.

(BTW I’m sorry but you won’t get a reply to your question from me – I don’t have Word 2007, and from what I’ve heard multilevel lists work differently than in earlier versions)

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I would also love to include a bibliography, but everything I read says it’s not worth using the Word Version. I already have a bibliography typed into a normal numbered list which is probably good enough. I am using footnotes.

Sometimes the old ways are easier and more stable. However, if you have certain format requirements that you find hard to meet, you could start a new thread about your bibliography, and include a sample document showing what you want to accomplish and/or what isn’t working the way it should.

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Karin,

I don’t have time to give a detailed response to your fourth post — and it would take some time to explain because of the complexity of the topic — but insofar as Tab and Shift Tab not working, you have to enable that in Word Options. Click the Office button, Word Options (at the very bottom of the drop-down), then click Proofing and click AutoCorrect Options. On the AutoFormat As You Type tab, in the bottom third, you’ll see a checkbox labeled “Set left- and first-indent with tabs and backspaces.” Checking the box will enable the use of Tab and Shift Tab to change levels in a list or outline. But watch out because it also will convert a regular press of the Tab key into a first-line indent, which might or might not be what you want to do.

If you wish to change the list levels without the Tab and Shift tab keys, you can press Alt Shift right arrow (to increase the indent / demote the list level to a lower level) or Alt Shift left arrow (to decrease the indent / promote the list level to a higher level). Alternatively, you can click the Increase Indent and Decrease Indent buttons in the upper row of the Paragraph group on the Home tab.

As for the multilevel lists, keep in mind that when you create a new list style, the style includes all levels of the list (you ordinarily wouldn’t set up a different list style for each level, but you would create a different list style if you want one list style to use regular outline numbering and another one to use legal-style numbering). Note that you can incorporate both regular outline numbering and legal-style numbering in one list style, which means you don’t need to — and shouldn’t — create additional list styles simply to change the numbering type. You can do that through the numbering dialog when you are creating or modifying the list style.

You should be able to modify each level of the list style from within the dialog box. Click the “Format” button in the lower left-hand corner of the Define New List Style dialog, then click “Numbering.” From within the Modify Multilevel list dialog, click to highlight an individual level in the narrow box on the left side, then adjust the number style, font, etc. etc. If necessary, click the “More” button at the lower left corner of the Modify Multilevel list dialog to see all of the available options.

It’s time-consuming, but you should be able to work your way through the dialog box.

Let us know.

Sorry I don’t have more time right now.

Good luck!

Jan

P.S. If you have chosen to make your list style available in the underlying template rather than in the current document, you should see the style at the very bottom of the Multilevel list gallery under “List Styles.” (If you have saved the list style only in the one document, you won’t see the style in the gallery except when you have that specific document on your screen.) If you position the mouse over the image of the style in the gallery, a pop-up will appear with the name you assigned to the list style. The list also appears at the top of the gallery under Current List when you are working in a document where you have inserted a list using that style.

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Dear Jan,
Thank you for your explanations! My tab key is working now, so I don’t know what the problem was, because the Office Button box had been checked all along (must be the default).

This is not at all intuitive for me. I’m still at it and slugging through. What I still miss about the old word processing software (was it called WordStar??) was that with a flick of a button, you could see all the formatting behind the text and fix things easily. Word 2007 is so non-transparent and difficult to unravel mistakes!
Karin

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Hi, Karin,

I’ve finally gotten a chance to take a (quick) look at your document, and I have a few suggestions for you.

First, I don’t know how you are modifying your List Style now, but you need to do so from within the Multilevel List gallery, not from within the Styles Pane. (You can modify the Heading styles themselves from within the Styles pane — independently of the List Style. Once you have the List Style and the Heading styles set up to your satisfaction, you link each level of the List Style to a Heading level style. But the best practice is to modify the numbers and letters — including the font for the numbers and letters — as well as the indentation of the number and the text from within the Multilevel List gallery. Those are attributes of the List Style itself.)

With a document containing that List Style on the screen, open the Multilevel List gallery and navigate to the very bottom. There you will see your List Style. When you position the mouse over the image, you should see a pop-up with the style name.

When you right-click the style, you’ll see a Modify command. Click that to open the Modify Style dialog. Before proceeding, be sure to click the “New documents based on this template” button if you wish to save the modified style for use in future documents. Then click the Format button in the lower left-hand corner of the Modify Style dialog and click Numbering. When the Modify Multilevel List dialog appears, click the “More” button if necessary to display all of the options.

From within this dialog, you can modify individual levels of the list. Just click the Level indicator at the left side of the dialog box to select a level, then make any adjustments you wish. Note that about halfway down the dialog you have the option of changing the number or letter format (and, if you wish, adding or removing punctuation such as parentheses or periods); note as well that there is a separate “Font” button that allows you to specify the font for the number or letter.

In the bottom third of the dialog, you can set the number position as well as the position of the text. “Number alignment” basically refers to the position where the number will appear (such as at the left margin, in which case the alignment would be 0″, or half an inch, in which case the alignment would be .5″, and so on). “Text indent at” determines where the text will start (and where it will wrap to — in other words, the indentation of every line of the paragraph after the first line). But note that there is also a drop-down labeled “Follow number with.” In the first level of your list — which you indicate is not indented correctly — you have the “Text indent at” set at .5″, but the text immediately after the number is not indented half an inch. I think that’s because in the “Follow number with” drop-down you selected “Space” rather than “Tab.” When I chose the “Tab” option from that drop-down, the text following the number indented half an inch, which presumably was your intent.

Ordinarily, you do not have to click “Add a tab stop,” although whether you choose that option obviously will depend on how you are setting up a particular list.

There’s one more option I want to point out (you might be aware of all of these settings already, but I’m going over them just in case): In this version of Word, you have the ability to set the Text indent for all levels of the list at once. That might be helpful, but again it depends on how you want your list set up.

When you’ve finished adjusting the settings for the numbers/letters and indents for each level of the list, OK out of the dialog box. Assuming you have saved the modified List Style to the underlying template, it should be available — from the Multilevel List gallery — in all future documents.

Oh, and if you like, when you modify the List Style (be sure to save it to the template each time you change it) you can set up a keyboard shortcut to invoke the list. From within the Modify Style dialog, click the Format button, then click Shortcut Key, and when the Customize Keyboard dialog appears, navigate to the “Press new shortcut key” box and press the keystrokes you’d like to use to invoke the List Style — such as Alt L for list, or whatever is easy for you to remember. If that key combination is assigned to another function, you’ll see a message to that effect. You can choose to assign the keyboard shortcut anyway (overriding the existing assignment) or you can choose a different key combo for your List Style. Then OK out of the dialog.

One more thought: When you create/modify your heading styles, go into the Font dialog and make sure to choose a specific font face, size, and color, rather than using the +Heading font. The +Heading font is a placeholder or variable; when you use it, the font for your heading depends on which **theme** is in effect in Word 2007. (If that’s okay with you, then go ahead and use the +Heading font. However, I get the impression from your posts that the fonts are changing unexpectedly, and that is likely the reason why. The +Heading designation essentially lets Word choose a font based on the active theme, which can cause the behavior you are seeing — where the font changes when you don’t expect or intend it to.)

I hope this fuller explanation is helpful to you.

Let us know.

Jan

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