Formatting Individual Numbers in an Outline

[Allison Orange]

We have recently begun using Word 2002 for a document with a large outline
and we are using Word's automatic numbering for this. Our problem stems
from our need to electronically "mark" up the document with underlines and
strikeouts to indicate text which has been added and deleted respectively.
It is similar to Tracked Changes, except that the marking actually become a
historical record of changes in the document, which we never remove. (We
refer to this as legislative format or "type and strike", although I am not
sure I have seen either term used outside our agency.)

Our problem is in attempting to underline or strikeout the paragraph numbers
for just certain items. Every time we try to format one of them, the entire
list becomes formatted in that way. The only way that I have found to work
around this is to type in the number as text where it needs to have special
formatting and have the next item in the list reset to start the numbering
correctly.

Hopefully, there is a better way than this.

TIA,
Allison Orange
(e-mail address removed)
Systems Project Consultant
Florida Public Service Commission

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Hi Allison:

Hmmm... I've never heard it called "Type and Strike" either I have
always heard it referred to as "Black-lining".

Anyway: the format of an Automatically-generated list number depends on the
format applied to the paragraph mark at the end of the paragraph that the
number begins.

If you click your Show/Hide button to reveal your paragraph marks, select
the paragraph mark, and apply underline to it, you will get an underlined
number on that paragraph. If you select just the paragraph mark, only the
number will change. If you select the entire paragraph you know what
happens. If you select any of the text, the whole paragraph will underline,
you then need to select the text you don't want underlined and remove the
underline.

I would be worried about the stability of this technique though. I would
assume that at some future update when the numbering updated, the formatting
of the number may be removed. Just check that this does not happen.

If it does, you would need to run the "ConvertNumbersToText" macro to fix
all the numbering in the document as ordinary text.

Select the numbering you want to convert and run this macro:

Sub ConvertNumbersToText()
Selection.Range.ListFormat.ConvertNumbersToText
End Sub

Or more simply, to do the whole document without any selecting:

Sub ConvertNumbersToText()
ActiveDocument.ConvertNumbersToText
End Sub

Hope this helps

This responds to article <[email protected]>, from

We have recently begun using Word 2002 for a document with a large outline
and we are using Word's automatic numbering for this. Our problem stems
from our need to electronically "mark" up the document with underlines and
strikeouts to indicate text which has been added and deleted respectively.
It is similar to Tracked Changes, except that the marking actually become a
historical record of changes in the document, which we never remove. (We
refer to this as legislative format or "type and strike", although I am not
sure I have seen either term used outside our agency.)

Our problem is in attempting to underline or strikeout the paragraph numbers
for just certain items. Every time we try to format one of them, the entire
list becomes formatted in that way. The only way that I have found to work
around this is to type in the number as text where it needs to have special
formatting and have the next item in the list reset to start the numbering
correctly.

Hopefully, there is a better way than this.

TIA,
Allison Orange
(e-mail address removed)
Systems Project Consultant
Florida Public Service Commission

--

Please respond only to the newsgroup to preserve the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[Allison Orange]

John, this is exactly what we were looking for, except I cannot get it to
underline the numbers. I am able to use your technique for the
strikeout...in fact any text effect, bold, italics, etc....just not
underline. Could it be that I do not have on some necessary setting to have
underline work in this manner?

Thanks again for your help.
Allison Orange

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

This varies between versions. MS can't seem to "get it right" (that is,
every time they make a change, a different set of users is inconvenienced).