Hi Candace:
Ignore the expostulations of that whinging ex-pat. We threw him out of
Australia because of behaviour like that
No: Seriously, Elliott is correct: "Pasting" from external documents is a
real minefield.
You have customised your outline numbering the way you want it? Great.
There are three points that are utterly crucial:
1) Your numbering must have been defined as part of a set of STYLES. If
your numbering is not style-based, it will never be stable.
2) You must use the built-in styles for numbering: particularly the Heading
1 to Heading 9 series. If you don't, it will always be fragile.
3) You MUST paste UNFORMATED from other documents. If you don't, you will
paste in their numbering definitions on top of yours: and you've discovered
what happens next.
The built-in styles have special properties hard-coded to make them stable
when used with numbering.
Outline Numbering works off a List Template. The List Template is a strange
beast: it is a set of nine containers of numbering formatting. Each
container is designed to set the numbering formatting for one, and only one
style. When you look in the Format>Bullets and Numbering dialog, the
Outline Numbering tab shows you a selection of list templates (the seven
most-recently used in the document). There are potentially many more, but
the dialog can show you only seven.
A single List Template has global scope within the document. That means
that the list template that controls, say, the heading numbering, controls
all of the heading numbering in the entire document.
You can have up to about 200 different list templates all active in a single
document at the same time, but let's assume for now that you don't. Let's
assume that there is only ONE list template in control of all of your
heading numbering.
That List Template has nine levels, so the first thing you need to do is use
Shauna Kelly's instructions to "attach" nine different styles to that List
Template.
You must ensure that none of the nine styles has been used with any other
kind of numbering in that document. One of the traps for young players is
that people may try to associate more than one list template with a
particular style. It won't work, and the resulting mess is nasty
When you paste from another document, Word tries to being across both the
style, the list template, and the formatting. The resulting toxic soup
usually defies efforts to fix it.
To avoid this, paste in plain text only. That does not try to bring in
either the style or the number formatting. You can then correctly format
the pasted text using the styles you already have in the document.
Now, all you have to do is persuade your users to always use styles, and to
use the correct styles all the time. That can be a challenge...
Hope this helps
I'm creating an outline numbering scheme for our firm for some docs that we
use very frequently. I can get the outline numbering customized and when I
type in new information it works great. BUT if i copy any information from
another document in...it totally messes up. I also wanted to add the
numbering to styles so it could be applied to existing docs but that isn't
working either.
--
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
[email protected]