Outline Numbering for Headings and Body Text Working Together with updates to Styles

[Tas.Ranson]

I am using Word 2003, but this problem has been dogging me for years.
I thought I had it skun until today and now I am stumped.

Most of our large documents are technical reports and require a
numbering setup like this:

1. Heading 1

1.1 Heading 2

1.1.1 Body 3

1.1.2 Body 3

2. Heading 1

2.1 Body 2

3. Heading 1

3.1 Heading 2

3.1.1 Heading 3

3.1.1.1 Body 4

3.1.1.2 Body 4

etc... ie all headings and paragraphs are numbered and body paragraphs
are numbered in the context of their preceding headings. The Body
paragraphs are set to Body Text level so that the whole document works
well in Outline Mode.

The Headings are Bold number and bold text, with spacing before etc.

The Body Text are numbered as normal rather than bold and have no space
before.

I have setup Heading 1-9 and based them on Outline Numbering Gallery
List item 5, and linked Heading 1 to level 1, through Heading 9 to
level 9.

I have then created BodyText1 through BodyText9 styles, each based on
the corresponding Heading Style, but without the bold numbering and the
space before etc and this works fine (with the body text numbering
flowing from the heading numbering).

I have even written VBA to setup the styles etc and make sure
everything can be reset if something goes wrong.... except...

We have another requirement for similar documents to have un-numbered
paragraphs - so I though, easy I will just write a macro to turn the
BodyText1-9 numbering on and off, then the one template can be used for
all these different documents.

This is where the train comes off the rails.... Once I have turned the
numbering off on the BodyText Styles (either manually or using VBA),
then try to turn it back on again, the numbering for the BodyText no
longer flows from the numbering in the headings, it is only numbered
within its own list, so the above comes out as:

1. Heading 1

1.1 Heading 2

1.1.1 Body 3

1.1.2 Body 3

2. Heading 1

1.1 Body 2

3. Heading 1

3.1 Heading 2

3.1.1 Heading 3

1.1.1.1 Body 4

1.1.1.2 Body 4

Does anyone have any pointers as to how I might achieve this - my only
other thought was rather than programatically change the numbering of
the styles I could programatically change the style of all the
paragraphs in the document with a BodyTextN style to a
BodyTextUnnumbered style. The problem with this approach is switching
back......

Any thoughts would be most appreciated.

Tas Ranson
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Stefan Blom]

Couldn't you create Body Text Unnumbered 1, Body Text Unnumbered 2,
etc. styles, one for each numbered body text style, and replace them
whenever you want the "unnumbered version"? This can of course be done
with a macro, using the Find object.