Word 2003: restart heading numbers

[PaulNeubauer]

Hi folks,

I was preparing a document the other day and ran into a weird style formatting problem that has been driving me up the wall. I hope I'm just missing something somewhere and I hope that someone knows where I'm missing it.

Think of a document sort of like a FAQ, with Q+A organized in a small number of categories. Heading 1 is the main title for the document. There are a couple of major sections, which logically enough, I titled using Heading 2. (Of course, the actual formatting of the styles is not the Word default -- I've changed things like font, size, numbering, etc.) Under each section, there are a bunch of subsections, each with a lead-in and then discussion that can run to multiple paragraphs. So, I decided to style these lead-in questions as Heading 3. I want to number these subsections and I want to number them within the sections, that is, for each section, I want to restart the numbering. On the other hand, I don't particularly want to number the sections -- there just doesn't seem to be any point to it.

So, in the "Styles and Formating" dialog, I gave Heading 3 a number. Of course, all instances of Heading 3 got numbered consecutively from the beginning of the document. So far, so good. All Right, says I, there's probably a box somewhere to tell it where to reset the numbering. I couldn't find one. I inserted a (continuous) section break just above a Heading 2. No change. I tried a couple of other types of section break. No change.

I next tried the "Outline Numbered" tab and under "Customize" found a "Restart Numbering after" control, where I picked "Level 2". This option restarted the numbering correctly for my Heading 3 style, but it also added numbers to my Heading 2 style, which I didn't want. If I went to the style dialog and modified Heading 2 to remove its numbering, the Heading 3 reverted to consecutive for the whole document.

So far, what it looks like is that you can't have a single level of numbered headings that restarts the numbers within sections; you can only have TWO levels of numbered headings where the subordinate level can be made to restart within the superordinate level.

Is this right? It seems like a weird restriction to me. I've done all sorts of funky things with numbered styles over the years, but just hadn't happened on this particular combination. (Yes, I know I can do it with LaTeX and even how to do it, but it doesn't seem worth it for such a small job. And besides, the people I have to email it back and forth with for comments don't know about LaTeX.) Has anyone else out there had a similar format that they wanted and managed to get around this? If so, how? I would be grateful for any and all clues.

Thanks,
Paul

 

[PaulNeubauer]

I've kept looking and just for the sake of anyone else who might want to do something like this, I will document what (little) I have found.

On the Microsoft Word MVP FAQ Site I found an article by Margaret Aldis entitled Restarting list numbering using a higher level style. Her suggestions should do what I was asking for, but it's a lot of work that way. The amount of setup required is impressive. You have to run some VBA script, set up some autotext, etc. This is definitely not something I'd bother doing for a 2-5 page document, especially not after having already written most of it.

The other technique that I have found involves (manually) inserting a sequential number field into each heading. The field I wound up using was like: {SEQ h3 \s 2} (i.e., set up a SEQuential set of numbers named "h3" and restart the numbering after every level 2 heading).

After I came up with this ideaa, I kept looking to see if I could attach a field like this to a style and the closest I found was an article titled Autonumbering with RoboHelp and Microsoft Word which has a suggestion for setting up and using autocorrect entries to assist. That may be worthwhile if you plan to do it often, but I just inserted the field into one of my Heading 3 paragraphs and then did a copy/paste into all the others. This method has two rather significant disadvantages: 1) it does involve manual insertion of the field rather than something taken care of by a style, and 2) because it is a field instead of a numbering style it does not continuously auto-update -- you have to do something such as "Select All" and F9 or print the document to see the correct numbers.

All in all, I can't say that I'd really recommend either of these as a "solution" for a short, ad hoc document. Either of them, and especially the first, might be worth the trouble if you are doing something long and complex where the setup time becomes a smaller fraction of the total. Of course, in that case, LaTeX is another real alternative too.

I hope this proves to be a help to somebody, somewhere down the line.

Best,
Paul