Hi Paul,
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I got the error:
"Run-time error '5941': The requested member of the collection does not exist."

You probably realise that I don't know what I'm doing, but I clicked "Debug" and the following line was highlighted:
.Paragraphs(i).Range.Words.First = i

Paul

*EDIT*
I've now looked at the text that was left, and have seen that a key piece of information was missing from my description. Some list items have carriage-returns within them. I realise that this is important because the macro you provided replaced (as I assume it was intended to) the first word of each new line with a sequential number - including those lines within list items. I think that the find term "^p*.^t" (or similar) is probably key here - I think that it's the only reliable way to identify the start of each list item.