Word numberng blows up when open documents

[Giselle C.]

Hello,

Let me first say thanks to all of you MVPs who help the rest of us with our
Word problems. If it wasn't for you guys, a lot of us would have lost our
minds already.

Here is my problem: I am working on some documents that have Outline heading
numbering. Our headings should be numbered as follows:

Heading 1.0
Heading 1.1
Heading 1.2
Heading 2.0
Heading 2.1
Heading 2.1.1
Heading 2.1.2
Heading 2.1.2.1
Heading 2.1.2.2
etc.

Our heading numbering is breaking all the time, so we tried to do some fixes
in the template. We thought we got it working, but now, when we reopen our
documents, we lose all of the heading numbering and a bullet appears before
the heading title instead of the numbering. So now our headers look like this:

Title of Heading 1
Title of Heading 1.1
Title of Heading 1.2
Title of Heading 2.0
Title of Heading 2.1.1
Title of Heading 2.1.2
Title of Heading 2.1.2.1
Title of Heading 2.1.1.2
etc
I really don't know what to do to fix this. So far, the only way we have
been refixing it is by rebuilding the documents which is very time consuming.
We don't know if this is just a bandaid solution that would break again in
the future so we are looking for a permanent fix to this problem.

Can you enlighten us? Please and thank you.

 

[Margaret Aldis]

Hi Giselle

The most (probably only) reliable way of setting up outline numbering on
headings is to use the built-in heading styles and set the numbering up as
described by Shauna Kelly at
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/OutlineNumbering.html. Be sure to
follow the instructions precisely.

If your numbering blows up when you re-open documents, this might also
indicate that you have 'Automatically update document styles' checked in
Tools > Templates and Add-ins. You should always leave this unchecked,
although if you set up heading styles as described above you will often be
able to check the check box temporarily to update styles from template when
necessary.

 

[Giselle C.]

Thank you Margaret for your advice. This will be very helpful for building
future templates. However, we cannot rebuild the current templates since they
are the corporate standard and we are stuck with them. So is there a quick
fix for the existing documents without having to rebuild all of them?

Thank you again.

 

[Margaret Aldis]

Hi Giselle

Difficult to predict what if any 'quick fixes' will help. It would be worth
resetting the Format > Bullets and Numbering Panes as that's a sump of
numbering format changes. If you are currently applying the numbering as
direct formatting rather than using paragraph styles, you could probably use
a List Style instead without fundamentally changing the templates. At the
least that would be quicker and safer to re-apply if/when the numbering
blows up.