Can I reverse the order of a numbered list?

[Barnet]

Hi,

I'm working with a numbered list. I need to be able to reverse the entire
list, so that the last item becomes the first, etc.

Is there a way to generate this effect without painstakingly selecting/
cutting and then dragging / pasting items across pages?

Thanks in advance,

Barnet

 

[Rae Drysdale]

Select the text you wish to sort, and from the Table menu chose Sort. Then
select the order, ascending or descending. Presumably your numbers are at the
beginning of the line, so this should work.

 

[Barnet]

Hi Rae,

Thanks for the suggestion, but I can't seem to make this work. I have Word
2007.

I made a test file using the numbered list format, basically: 1. One 2.
Two etc., up to six, in a vertical column.

Then I went to the Table menu, and it seems I had to convert the text into a
table. So I selected that, and then chose to separate text at paragraphs,
since each item ends with a paragraph command. I selected the entire table.

But when I got to the Sort menu I got confused. I tried making the file a
one column table and a six column table. I tried several choices for the
drop-down menus, but nothing really seemed to work. When I selected Column 1
for 'sort by', text for 'type', and paragraphs for 'using', and hit
'ascending', the items resorted numbered 1 - 6, but the text read five, four,
one, six, three, two. In other words, it sorted my original table in a
ridiculous order.

Well, I don't know if this is clear enough to be helpful, but so far I'm
still at a loss.

Thanks,

Barnet

 

[Rae Drysdale]

Hi Barnet, I had a look at the 2007 version of this, and on the Home tab, in
the Paragraph section, there is a sort button. If you click on this and
select the ascending or descending option you should be able to sort without
changing to tables.

 

[Barnet]

Thanks again Rae,

OK, I now see that sort by 'text' means alphabetically by the first letter
of the first word, which is why the order of the paragraphs got mixed up
before. And I see that sorting by 'number' does not include sorting a
numbered list. Instead, if I just put a 1 at the start of each first
sentence, I'm able to sort all the paragraphs in descending order.

That'll work well enough, even though I'll need to go and erase all those
numbers for the final product. (Got any ideas to make that one easier? )

I appreciate your help very much.

Barnet

 

[Rae Drysdale]

Just a suggestion for deleting the numbers! If you hold down the Alt key you
can select vertically to delete. You may have to do this a couple of times
depending on how many figures you have, eg 1-9 and then 9-99, 100-999.