aarrrggghhh! ms word help, please?

April 13, 2009 10:00 AM

sigh. using ms word 2003, sp3, and am trying to figure out how--or if it's even possible--to number all the paragraphs in the document. this is for a multi-reviewer document that has 1,745 paragraphs.

the word count function under the tools menu will show me how many characters, words, lines, paragraphs & pages are in the document, but i can't find out how to number the paragraphs & display that number. i want the paragraph numbers displayed for the review only, not in the final document (which already has page & section numbers). it *used* to be a fairly simple thing. now it's driving me nuts. is it possible?

posted by msconduct to technology (5 comments total)

Turn numbering on for that style (under Bullets and Numbering) for the review, and turn it off again for the final.
posted by ottereroticist at 10:26 AM on April 13

just tried that, but it messes with the formatting (which also messes with page numbering) and it only applies to that particular paragraph style, not all paragraphs in the document. (plus, whoever wrote the damn thing doesn't know how to use styles and there are literally dozens of styles in the document.)
posted by msconduct at 10:34 AM on April 13

It's not exactly what you want, but if the main goal is providing a reference system for coordinating review... would line numbers be an acceptable alternative to paragraph numbers? At least they are easy to add and remove.
posted by rube goldberg at 11:01 AM on April 13

The field code {AUTONUM} will give you paragraph numbers but you will have to add it to every paragraph if you want them to appear.

The only way I can think of doing that automatically would be to use search and replace and replace every paragraph marker ¶ with ¶{AUTONUM}

Then when the draft is finished do the reverse to remove them all.
posted by Lanark at 11:13 AM on April 13 [1 favorite]

thanks rube & lanark. i ended up doing the line numbering (it IS very easy to add), but am curious about the autonum function & will try that tomorrow when i'm back to sweating over the document. stupid microsoft.
posted by msconduct at 4:46 PM on April 13