Word autonumbering help

October 7, 2022 9:35 AM

I am pretty good at Word but this issue is vexing me horribly. I have a new document with a heading that needs to start at 16.1.3. Easy! But when paragraph marks are set to "show" 1.0 to 16.0, 16.1.1, etc. show up. My team always has paragraph marks set to "show" and this hidden text appearing will confuse them and cause a lot of sturm und drang. How can I get this to work as desired?

Illustration.

Ultimate result wanted: the style for H3 is applied, but the numbering starts at 16.1.3 without having all the numbering leading up to that existing as hidden text.

I have been reading articles for over an hour and am hoping for a quick simple fix.

(My fix of "hide paragraph marks" was not well received!)

posted by misanthropicsarah to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You might be able to crack the .docx open (it is actually a zip archive of a bunch of XML and other files) and hand-edit the appropriate XML document. This is a thing I have done in past lives, but it has been a very long time, and not for this specific issue.

Obviously, doing this kind of thing can also irretrievably corrupt a document, so tread carefully, work on a copy, etc.
posted by rockindata at 9:55 AM on October 7, 2022

Change the colour of the "hidden" numbering to white/ the background colour? Then make them 1pt in size or something.
posted by porpoise at 10:29 AM on October 7, 2022

You can't delete those hidden parts without affecting the part you want to see?

It sounds like you don't want or it would be disruptive to edit the multi level list settings maybe? It could create inconsistency with other documents.

Numbered lists in Word are notoriously broken. Did you use the multi level list feature to set up this style in the first place, or is this built in numbering? If you use these frequently, setting up the numbered lists properly is tedious but worthwhile.
posted by lookoutbelow at 11:54 AM on October 7, 2022

Response by poster: when the hidden parts are deleted, it wrecks the numbering of 16.1.3 (that is, changes it to 1.1.1). i did use the multi level list feature.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 12:01 PM on October 7, 2022

If you are on the 16.1.3 line you should be able to right click and select "Set Numbering Value...". If you have the radio button set to "Start New List" you then should be able to set the starting numbering to 16.1.3.
posted by machine at 12:16 PM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

as lookoutbelow states, numbering in Word is easy to break. Somehow your 4.1.3 has gotten disconnected from the set of numbered lines that contain 4.1.2. So you might go find 4.1.2, press enter to make the next line (which will be 4.1.3 and then copy paste your text there. Rather than trying to number the 4.1.3 text wherever it is now.

Honestly though when this starts to happen for me in a doc, i just want until I'm fully done with the doc and then renumber last thing.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 2:43 PM on October 7, 2022

If the previous numbers you want are in the same document, I will sometimes also use the format painter (Ctrl+Shift+C for the previous number, Ctrl+Shift+V where you want the next number).
posted by lookoutbelow at 7:07 PM on October 7, 2022