Outline Numbering

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Is there any conceivable way of having more than 9 levels in a list template?

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You can’t have more than nine levels in one list template but you can have several list templates in one document. So you could have an ‘outline’ that ‘virtually’ contains more than 9 levels.

The trick would be to make sure that you very carefully set-up both list templates:

(1) Use Outline List Templates (not numbering or bullets)
(2) Name your list templates (in Listnum Field List Name)
(3) Associate every level in your list templates with a style. (you would probably want to name your styles in your first list template, Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. and then, for your second list template, Heading 10, Heading 11 and so forth but you’ll need to create your styles before you begin to define your list template).
(4) you can then use your list numbering simply by activating the appropriate style name (and you can add the additional styles into your TOC definition, etc.).

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No, there is no way to do this. There are some work-arounds, though. Before you go too far with your template, take a look at
Word’s Numbering Explained (http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm)

How to Create a Template, Part 2 (http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm)

Legal Numbering (http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/numbering.htm)

Seven Laws of Outline Numbering (http://www.microsystems.com/fra_sevenlawsofoutlinenumbering.htm)

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I hope this makes sense — you’ve said you want to dispense with Heading 1. Why? Within the legal community Heading 1 may very well be “Article 1” (or “One”). If you want to call is “Section 1” (again, in the legal community, normally obtained through heading 2) you can just adjust heading 1 to show “Section” 1 – rather than Article 1. As you are aware, Headings 1-9 are shipped with Word and can be modified to suit your firm/company’s requirements but you’ll run into difficulties, if for example, you want to create a style called heading 10. It will allow the style creation, but linking it in B&N is a problem.
If for some reason you need to create a new document based on a particular template and need to disregard Heading 1, you can run into difficulties as Word works on the premise of “restart numbering after higher level list”. You could modify Heading 1 style to suit the document but you’d need to step through all the styles (Headings 1-9) to adjust those styles for that particular document.
You can add all the styles you want within your template, for example: your Document is finished but you need to add Schedules which require numbering used by say, Headings 1-4. You can’t use Headings 1-4 in the Schedules without messing up the front end of the doc. So you create a new style and call it, say, “Schedule 1”. This will allow you to have Schedule 1 using “1” as in Heading 1; create a style called Schedule 2 (using your heading 2 numbering – say (a)); Schedule 3 (…”(i”)), …etc. And of course, your shortcut keys will need to be adjusted for those newly-created styles. i.e. Heading 1 we have assigned to Alt+1; Heading 2 is Alt+2, etc. For Schedule 1 we use Alt+Shift+1, etc. etc. HTH

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Something that I didn’t see mentioned or perhaps I just didn’t catch it in my late night reading is that when a different set of styles is created for a second list template in the same document, wouldn’t the outline level need adjusted to each one of them in the Paragraph formatting dialog box so that they will be recognized by the Document Map, Outline View and TOC?

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Hi,

You’re right that is something that wasn’t mentioned, and is something one may want to do when creating additional styles for outline numbered lists.
For these to be retained as part of the style definition, I wouldn’t add these via Format>Paragraph, but rather via Format>Style>Modify etc.

It does seem to turn out that for many of these extra numbering outlnes, the need is not there to include them in the table of contents. For instance, at my firm we also use a Schedule 1 etc. series for numbering in schedules, appendices etc. But this numbering almost never gets listed in the TOC; we only put the schedule headings in. (This may just be a quirk of how the documents are done at my firm.)

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s not absolutely necessary to use the built-in Heading styles for your main outline numbering scheme; I know this goes against orthodoxy but it’s quite functional to do without Heading 1-9.

Gary

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Touche’ on the style modifying through Format|Style|Modify etc. Our users lovingly refer to that as “digging to China” compliments of an article ferreted from the Microsystems site.

We did indeed bypass using Headings 1-9 because we receive documents from clients that incorporate their use in their tradtional sense so we have uniquely named styles for our main numbering list – which does not include any reference to our firm name for purposes of avoiding metadata. We’re often asked to work on things as a third party and must remain invisible. Which brings to mind – what do the rest of you use for purposes of removing metadata? Is it a concern at the firms of any of the rest of you? Perhaps this is fodder for a separate post.

Back to the numbering list however, using the unique names allows us to drop the styles easily into any document that doesn’t have them by using an autotext entry stored in a a global template.

And speaking of TOC – what about instances of partial entries requiring use of the Hidden Paragraph Marker. I’ve written a macro that does this chore for us but I wondered what style others are applying to the “second half” of the paragraph. I created an unnumbered companion style to the numbered list style and chained it back to the numbered list so that if a user hit enter at the end of the second half of the paragraph, the numbering would seamlessly continue. I wondered how others might have handled this.

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Hi WW,

Good to hear of others who have eschewed Headings 1-9 and thrived.

For some leads on metadata, see this earlier thread – gives a link to a download available from Payne Consulting (I’ve meant to but haven’t looked at that yet). I think there was also some discussion of this topic in a Bob Blacksberg column in an issue of WOW some months ago – I think he mentioned his firm was working on a similar utility.

Speaking of TOC – the hidden paragraph mark trick is used pretty universally, and I think is also incorporated into some of the “for pay” utilities – I recall looking at a demo from Payne Consulting relating to this too.

Like you, I wrote a macro for this.
But, we had a special problem in our documents, that required a special solution – I wonder if anyone else has encountered this one:

Suppose it’s your third level numbered paragraphs (let’s say they are numbered (a), ( etc.) that will feature that run-in heading, where we want only the heading to show in the TOC.

Using the hidden paragraph mark trick, it’s easy enough to have only the headings go into the TOC.

But, lawyers being lawyers, they insist on using the (a)-level numbering inconsistently in their legal documents: in some places they feature run-in headings (that need to go into the TOC), and in other places in the same run of outline numbered clauses, they want to use the (a)-level numbered paragraphs just as text only, with no headings (and no TOC entry for these).

So the question was: how do you get the “(a) with heading” paragraphs to show up in the TOC, while leaving the “(a) without heading” paragraphs out of the TOC. I don’t believe this is something which the commercial utilities can handle.

This gave us fits until a friend of mine (props to Stephan Ip) wrote for us (I was new to VBA at the time) a utility that customizes the creation of TOCs in these documents, and tests conditions in these paragraphs to determine which get included in the TOC, and which don’t – a great solution which we use every day.

Has anyone else faced this particular problem, and what sort of solutions have you found?

Gary

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Hi Gary:
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So the question was: how do you get the “(a) with heading” paragraphs to show up in the TOC,
while leaving the “(a) without heading” paragraphs out of the TOC. I don’t believe this is
something which the commercial utilities can handle.

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[/indent]I haven’t come up against this but couldn’t you use (a) with a paragraph level & use another (a) paragraph style with identical indents that is set with a body text level.

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Hi Phil,

I’m not completely sure I understand your suggestion.

The issue we had is that we couldn’t use two different styles for these two different situations, as in both situations they needed to support the same outline numbering. Below is a very schematic attempt to display the issue:

ARTICLE I – CALL THIS STYLE LEVEL 1
Section 1.1 Call This Style Level 2
(a) Level 3; this goes into TOC The rest of this is really part of another paragraph and doesn

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Hi Gary:

OK. I think I misunderstood, or didn’t think through the issue. While I’d have to play around with it (not knowing VBA, I’m always looking for another method), but I’m wonder if you could:

In your ARTICLE 1 example, have 5 styles (4 heading with numbering & 1 that follows the hidden paragraph mark). The 4 heading styles with numbering are picked up by the TOC because you specify certain styles when using the Insert/Index & Tables…/TOC/Options.

In your ARTICLE 2 example, you can have identically formatted level 3 headings, but with a different name. Then they wouldn’t be picked up by the TOC.

Like I said, having not thought it through or tried it, it may be completely unworkable. Interesting problem though.

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And what was the little gem you used to deal with this problem? I’m curious because I hit this same snag yesterday in documents my bunch is producing.

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The short answer is that this forum may not be the best place to discuss details of it – it’s a huge piece of code (that I don’t completely understand!) – not to mention it’s proprietary.

Why don’t you send me a private message with some more details about your snag documents. (If you want you could e-mail a sample to my home e-mail as well – just change the names of the parties to protect the guilty).
Maybe we can come up with a simplified version of the solution, that might be postable back here.

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Thanks for the response Gary. I’ll send a private message. Thanks again.

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Hello, Gary – It’s been a while since we ‘talked’! When we switched to Microsoft Office/Word97 back in … hmmm m/be 97? we had templates that went through a set of [VBA] routines that performed all tasks for the user – i.e. eliminating all the work of cleaning up TofC, by using the hidden paragraph mark technique. The templates were fabulous! And within these templates we were able to have headings 2 & 3 appear in the ToC and the hidden text paragraph mark excluded the text following the heading. Great!
And then

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Hi Paddy,

Sorry I somehow missed reading your post yesterday.

The “headings always on separate line” method is the same as is used for most documents by our main office. This method obviously avoids TOC and document compare issues.

For one of the practice groups in our office though, we needed to do this “run-in heading/hidden paragraph mark” method.

The short answer to your last question is “yes” – we’ve done huge numbers of compares of these documents with CR, and have now moved over to DV, and these have worked OK.

I do have to say though that with CR, we would never run a compare of these documents until we had first run a “Pre-CompareRite” macro on both versions – this was something I created to minimize the problems CR was having. The Pre-CompareRite macro’s main feature was that it converted all autonumbering in the document to text. (I think in fact it converted all fields to text.) It also searched for the presence of any unaccepted track changes and accepted them. It ensured that hidden text was set to hidden.
[Our view was that it was OK to make all these changes to the versions to be compared, since at our firm we compare copies of the live versions (has to do with how our DMS works), and we don’t consider the compare output document to be anything but a temporary file.]

The result was that we were asking CompareRite to compare files that were as close to simple text as possible.

One of the great advantages of switching to DV was that we were able to scrap all of the pre-CR procedures – DV handles this kind of numbering and formatting in its natural state.

Gary

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Thanks – I remember using that pre-CompareRite macro and it was great for those users who were more “comptuer savvy” so to speak but trying to explain it to anyone outside of the help desk or support area was a real problem. So were were very happy to see the Workshare (DeltaView) people arrive on the scene. Nice to “talk” again! I’ve kept several of your responses from the old lounge and they have come in handy over the years. Cheers!

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I’m curious what problems you ran into with your compare issues when using the Hidden Paragraph marker and CompareRite and why the distate for Track Changes.[indent]

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(not Track Changes!!heavens forbid) without doing a major cleanup of the blacklined version?. Has anyone out there used the hidden paragraph mark technique and obtained a blacklined version of a large corporate document that accurately reflects the editing changes?

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[/indent] I ask these questions because we’ve reached a point where we are evaluating and going through the decision making process on what to use for our redlining – Track Changes & Word Compare vs. CompareRite and DeltaView

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Hi WW: I noticed that Gary F has started a new thread re CompareRite vs. Track Changes vs. DeltaView. I’m going to check it out shortly & I know you’ll find some good stuff there. It was either Grail or Gary F. who first alerted me to DeltaView (at the old Lounge) and it was one of the best tips I’ve garnered from this Lounge. We are now using DeltaView & I think it’s great (if a little on the pricey side). It will provide blacklined docs for us when CompareRite fails.
Re Track Changes: again, see the new thread, but basically a lot of information can be “leaked” if “accept or reject all changes” has not been done. Code was provided by Allan Bach (again at the old Lounge) which will alert the user to turn off/accept track changes. I still have that & can post it if Allan is no longer a visitor here. However there is a lot of metadata that can be grabbed from a Word doc we don’t like to add to that by using Track Changes. Bob Blacksberg in the “Word of Law” section of one of Woody’s newsletters referred to software that “Scrubbed Documents Clean” to get rid of metadata.
If it’s important for you to see the problems created with using hidden text and blackling, I’ll see if I can find some of the old documents we created using the templates with hidden text, do a blackline and post part of it to show you the problems created. I have not tried to use DeltaView on the docs. & will do so (if I locate the docs) and let you know the result.
I’ve also encountered numbering problems using Track Changes so that you need to “clean up” the tracked copy before printing/sending to client.
I don’t very often post but I do visit and follow threads of interest to me. So since I’m on a roll here, I just want to say that this Forum has provided me with a wealth of information over the years. Hat’s off to Woody and Eileen for creating the new site!!)

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eeegads! the challenges never end do they? I haven’t run into that yet but only because our herd is barely making the run into Word and they just haven’t generated enough documents yet to ask the question – but they will. I’m not strong in writing VB (yet Once he grasped it though, he fixed me right up.

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Hi WW,

Just a note to encourage you to go for the Word/VBA full steam – there’s no substitute for really knowing the application, as well as knowing its VBA object model, when trying to do these things.

Your story sounds familiar – I had similar experiences when I first moved over to Word and didn’t know VBA. The first programmer we brought in knew some VBA but didn’t know Word. Between us, it was pretty pathetic! Much later, I went back and looked at his code – there were cases where he wrote reams of code to get around not knowing something simple he could do in Word. Ultimately we replaced all the code he had written.

Christine Solomon talks about the same sort of thing amusingly in her book “Microsoft Office 97 Developer’s Handbook” (MS Press) – I think you’d find this book full of useful information. She also suggests that power users (who need to learn programming) make better office developers than do programmers (who need to learn to be power users).

Gary

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Thank you Gary, for the encouraging “Word”. LOL Ok, so my jokes are lame but I have to agree with the PowerUser to Developer theory because you almost have to have been in the hotseat of the user to understand how critical and beneficial what you’re doing for them ultimately is. I was a legal secretary for 8 years and a Word Processing Supervisor for 3 of the last 7 years that I’ve been training and developing. So I’ve seen a lot and the biggest snag I see in production is poorly designed forms and repetitive tasks done in an unnecessarily manual and labor intensive way. Automatic numbering wasn’t used at all in WordPerfect and being new users of Word, they were intimidated right off the bat when they attempted to do so using the Format|Bullets & Numbers method. Boy, did they love that PaintBrush until they learned abut styles. Similarly, they’ve been manually marking text with redline and strikeout because that’s what they learned to do in WP5.1 DOS, they’ve never had a third-party utility and they were never introduced to the built-in compare feature. They’re quite excited about learning Track Changes in classes next week. So hopefully our training program will pave the way to better utilization and increased productivity – then I’ll be able to focus whole heartedly on furnishing customized tools and specially designed forms to get them flying. Ahhh, I am a bit fond of dreaming, but one must have a goal.

P.S. Thanks for the tip on the book – I LOVE books and have them everywhere. Now I’ll have another one.

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Hi Pam:
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And speaking of TOC – what about instances of partial entries requiring use of the Hidden Paragraph Marker. I’ve written a macro that does this chore for us but I wondered what style others are applying to the “second half” of the paragraph. I created an unnumbered companion style to the numbered list style and chained it back to the numbered list so that if a user hit enter at the end of the second half of the paragraph, the numbering would seamlessly continue. I wondered how others might have handled this.

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I’m curious. Are you talking about something like:

Subject that goes into TOC: Body of text that appears to be in the same paragraph but is in a different style so won’t be picked up by TOC.

Is that right or could you go into more detail about why & when you use a hidden paragraph mark? Does your second style “mirror” the first style, except for the numbering?

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If you add outline numbering to your example, what you have would be right.
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1. Subject that goes into TOC: Body of text that appears to be in the same paragraph but is in a different style so won’t be picked up by TOC.

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[/indent]Because the numbering is tied to the Format Marker at the end of the paragraph, the Hidden Paragraph marker is needed to flag the TOC to include the text and the outline number which essentially cracks the paragraph in half and applies 2 styles – leaves the outline numbering style applied to the first half and applies an un-numbered companion style to the second half that is linked back to the outline numbered style so that when they hit enter in any of these split paragraphs, the outline numbering continues seamlessly.

For purposes of printing, the Hidden Paragraph marker is ignored but honored by the TOC. Pretty cool but it was a cumbersome task to perform over and over and without an understanding of what was happening, a user would easily delete it from the screen not realizing they were undoing the TOC. That’s why the macro and the different color applied to it and I went one step further and flagged the text with a comment that indicated to the user what was going on – plus that gave a nice yellow visual together with the red Hidden Paragraph Marker to let the user know what has and hasn’t been marked for the TOC.

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Hi Pam:

Thanks for the explanation. Do I understand correctly that for each of the unnumbered companion styles (that don’t show up in the TOC), the “style for the next paragraph” (in Format/Style/Modify/) is set to be its companion outline numbered style?

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yeppers – that would be so. When you generate the TOC the first time, you exclude them and VOILA! A TOC with just what you want and minus what you don’t want.

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>t style others are applying to the “second half” of the paragraph

I haven’t seen anyone make a suggestion about {TC} entries to identify text which is to appear in a TOC. I’m baffled by this thread.

Using paragraph styles as a means to generate a TOC is OK, but you ARE restricted to using an entire paragraph.

Using {TC} means you have much more control over the table of contsnts.

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Chris, the reason there is so much ado about the *Hidden Paragraph Marker* and not the use of the *TC* mark text is because the numbering of the paragraph is desired to be included in the TOC but because it is applied as part of the style, it won’t be without the inclusion of the paragraph mark and so the TC mark text option falls short. Therefore, we’re forced down the more complex road of designing ways to use the Hidden Paragraph Mark and it seems that most have done so by writing some sort of macro to do it since it takes several steps that would be quite time consuming in a large document. I personally liked visuals to indicate to my users that something out of the ordinary was happening so my macro makes the *Hidden Paragraph Mark* red, selects all the text desired for the TOC and flags it with a comment indicating that is what has happened which gives a nice yellow visual and a screentip; the macro also applies the proper companion style to the “text” half of the paragraph so that when hitting enter at the end of that paragraph, it chains back to the numbering style. Having served as a secretary for many years, I tried to think through what my expectation would be for ease of use and that was what I came up with. And, when I did training with them on it, I addressed the very question you posed because that is a very logical thought to use the TC mark text and would have been what my WordPerfect to Word converts would have naturally done since that was the way they did it in WordPerfect since they seldom used auto numbering in WordPerfect.

Hope that sheds some light for you.

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FWIW, there is a trick for getting the autonumbers to appear in the TOC, when marking TOC entries with TC fields.
(I read this on the Daily Word Tips list some time ago; sorry don’t recall who to attribute it to.)

The trick is to define the TOC styles to have the same outline numbering as the styles in the body of the document.

This trick does mainly work, but is kind of dangerous since there really is no direct link between the numbering in the body text and the numbering in the TOC.
So, for instance, if you have clauses 1, 2 and 3, and then customize the next one to start at 5 (in the body text), the TOC would still show the numbering as 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.

If you knew that the numbering in your document was always going to be ‘bog standard’, then you might be able to use this method. I wouldn’t trust it in legal documents, though.

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I might point out that research has shown that using more than 4 levels in a document makes it extremely difficult to follow. Even if you use 4 headings plus 4 for an appendix, that still leaves an extra one.

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We’ve got some very stable templates and don’t have any problems (unless of course someone decides to cut & paste from other docs – such as WP – without using Paste Special bringing in extraneous styles. Then they come crying for help and we do our trouble-shooting).
But Phil … only 4 levels? We’re talking lawyers here (no offence Charles K – I enjoy your addbalance stuff and especially your non-lawyerlike approach to document management! Our guys (especially the big corporate real estate types) frequently utilize all of headings 1-9 and then use Schedule, Appendix, Exhibits styles. I try to tell them when their documents exceed 150 pages they’ve said too much!

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Hi Patricia:
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But Phil … only 4 levels? We’re talking lawyers here (no offence Charles K – I enjoy your
addbalance stuff and especially your non-lawyerlike approach to document management! Our guys
(especially the big corporate real estate types) frequently utilize all of headings 1-9 and then use
Schedule, Appendix, Exhibits styles. I try to tell them when their documents exceed 150 pages they’ve
said too much!

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Well, as I said, using more than 4 levels in a document makes it difficult to follow. I don’t know anyone who considers reading a contract “light reading”. I rest my case!

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Ah, yes, Phil. Unfortunately for software support types, lawyers do not consider contract reading to be unwieldy – I think it’s their bedtime reading and it’s only the software /help desk/support people who cringe. But I know that we’re particularly lucky inasmuch as we have created templates that really work with Word’s ‘complicated’ (now isn’t THAT polite of me!) numbering system. And although we curse the intricacies of Word’s numbering we do seem to have mastered the beast. Not alone of course but with great input from Woody et al, Microsystems, the great MVP sites, all you people here at the Lounge, etc., etc.
Very Best, Phil. I’ve enjoyed reading your responses at Woody’s and at another location for many years.

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Thanks for making the point, Phil.
And succinctly put, too.
So often we do things because we have the capability …
without thinking through the consequences.
We find solutions …
for which there is no problem.
I’ve got a confession to make.
I thought I’d make a reply with ten levels …
but …
I’m running out of things to say!!!

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Indeed~

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