The way you are doing it is one of the simplest. Personally, I would
consider a document with that many "Start At" overrides to be unstable by
design. But if it is always going to be maintained by your team, and they
all know what they're doing, it will continue to work for you. It *will*
blow up from time to time, but if your people know what they are doing,
fixing it will take only half an hour or so.
The approach I would probably use is to manually type the "Section 110"
numbers. I would create a second style without numbering for the purpose.
So if you are using, for example, "Heading 2" style for the Section level,
you would create a second style "Heading 2 Manual Number" that has no
numbering, but otherwise identical formatting, which you use whenever you
want to type the number manually. Note: The Outline Level of the
non-numbered style must be set to "Body Text" in the Paragraph Format
properties.
That will be stable and simple. But it has the downside that your third
level (for example "Heading 3") can reset to "1" after only one specified
higher-level style. If that higher level style is Heading 2, you still get
the problem of having to use manual Start At overrides, but this time on
Heading 3...
Conversely, you can "build" any numbering format you like using SEQ fields.
You may be able to accomplish this particular requirement using LISTNUM
fields, and that's what I would try first, because LISTNUM fields update
automatically, you have to remember to explicitly update SEQ fields each
time you print or compile an index. However, SEQ fields are more flexible.
You can look both up in the Word Help: read the help very carefully: it's a
bit cryptic.
The downside of a field-based approach is that it requires a bit of
difficult field coding to get them to work. There are very few former
WordPerfect users left in the world who are comfortable doing this: you may
find the amount of training needed for your team to use this method reliably
is excessive.
But if you can get field-based numbering working for you, it is utterly
stable: the most stable of Word's numbering mechanisms.
Hope this helps
I have a long document that has fairly normal outline numbered styles;
however, the numbering of one level needs to count by fives:
Chapter 100.
Section 110
Section 115
Section 120
etc.
In a couple of cases, I'll need to count by tens (210, 220, 230, 240)
or sequentially (310, 311, 312, 313). What's the best way to handle
this without making the document unstable? I'd still like to be able
to use automatic cross-references, table of contents and index. Right
now we're manually overriding the numbering by changing the "start at"
value in the Customize Outline Numbering window.
Thank you!
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John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410
