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Old 04-29-2009, 02:20 PM
gdsmithtx gdsmithtx is offline Windows 7 64bit Office 2013
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Default MS Word 2007 numbered heading problem

New user here, signed up specifically to ask about this problem.



First the background: I have Office 2007 running on Windows XP SP2 on my work machine. I use MS Word to create/edit documents for proposals. Since we frequently re-use large blocks of boilerplate text, we have a standardized set of styles that have been used for a long time. If a chapter is titled "4.0 Execution Plan", the first line will say that with the style "BD 1.0 Chapter Title" applied (note that the number in this heading is not auto-generated ... it's just typed in). The rest of the automatically numbered heading styles in hierarchical order are "BD 1.1 Heading 2", "BD 1.1.1 Heading 3" and "BD 1.1.1.1 Heading 4". To adjust the automatic numbering to follow the chapter number, we used to use Word's Set Numbering Value feature and increment the number before the decimal to the proper chapter number (4.0 in this example), and all the rest of the numbers would flow properly.


The problem: A few months ago, Word (all by itself apparently) started adding in paragraphs with headings before the incremented heading with "missing" parts of the number hierarchy whenever we did this. When using Set Numbering Value now and incrementing the beginning number to 4, Word adds empty paragraphs with 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 heading numbers before the heading that I want to be numbered 4.1. So what I end up with is:

4.0 EXECUTION PLAN
1.0

2.0

3.0
4.0
4.1 Executive Summary (the heading number I actually wanted)

In the example above, I do not want the empty paragraphs numbered 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 & 4.0. I only want my typed-in main chapter heading (4.0 EXECUTION PLAN) and my 4.1 heading

This didn't happen with Office 2003, and it didn't happen in the first few months of us having Office 2007, either. One day, it just seemed to start doing it and it's never stopped since. It's not just my machine, either; it happens on coworkers' PCs who open the same documents as well. I've tried both deleting my normal.dot and having I.T. reinstall my Office 2007 to no avail.

Can someone please help? I want to simply be able to increment my numbering system manually without Word screwing me up by trying to be "helpful". These particular styles have been in use for many years and reformatting everything we use to match a new set of styles would be a very onerous task, especially considering how busy we generally are.

Thanks.


PS: The extra heading paragraphs are formatted with the style "List Heading", which Word apparently adds to the styles list when it creates these empty numbered paragraphs, because it doesn't appear in the styles list before manually incrementing the heading numbers.
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