Hi All,



I have a word document that I would like to organize with a TOC and headings/subs. It is currently organized as a multilevel list (though not actually formatted that way), and it doesn't seem as if there is a consistent formatting (i.e. every heading isn't necessarily bolded or underlined) e.g.:

Chapter 1
I. First Heading
A. First Subheading
1. First sub-subheading
a.
b.
2. Second sub-subheading
B.
II.
Chapter 2

You get the idea. Is there a fast way that I can format these into styles (eg. "Heading 1-9")? It is about a 250 page doc, so I'd prefer to avoid doing it manually in outline mode.
Thanks in advance!

Edit: It seems the spaces I put in don't display on the list, but they consecutively tab out.

How to create numbered headings or outline numbering in Ribbon Versions of Word by Shauna Kelly

Hi, thanks for the reply. Unfortunately this won't work for me as word doesn't recognize the list as a formatted list. When I try, it adds the new numbering system in addition to the old one, eg:

I. I. First Heading
A. A. First Subheading

Thoughts?
Thanks.

If the link that Charles provided above is not working for you then you are probably overlooking something in the process. That link is basically...the Bible for paragraph heading and formatting within MS Word. You may want to revisit the link and try again.

On another note, if you are only going to use Headings 1,2 and 3 for the TOC and the subsequent paragraphs (numerals 1, 2, 3 etc and a, b,c) outside of the TOC, you would want to format them in something other than Heading # style. For example, format those paragraphs in a style of List, Paragraph or, define your own style type.

Regarding the appearance of the list in the message, if you select the text and click the code tags icon (octothorpe, or #) in the reply toolbar it will preserve indents and spaces. It will be labeled as code, but that's OK.
To your original question, I'm not clear as to whether the original document uses outline (multi-level) numbering or instead the numbers were written in manually (or that's how they showed up when copied from another source). I ask because I have not seen Word add two numbering schemes to the same paragraph. Not saying it couldn't happen (Word still surprises me, sometimes pleasantly and sometimes not), but only that I think I would have seen it by now in my own explorations.
If the numbering has been applied manually, you may be able to get most of it done with some wildcard find and replace. First, format Headings 1, etc. in the outline numbering format of your choice.
I can't tell from what you posted what the actual formatting might be, but assuming the I, II, etc. headings are at the margin (0 indent) you could do this as a wildcard F&R:

Find: (I{1,}.^t)(*^13)
Replace: \2
For the replace, also do Format >> Style >> Heading 1

The part enclosed in the first parentheses is to find one or more instances of the letter I followed by a period and a tab. The second parentheses searches for any text after that, followed by a paragraph mark (that is to say the Enter key was pressed -- note that ^13 is needed to find a paragraph when doing a wildcard search, otherwise ^p). The replace is the text of the paragraph followed by the paragraph mark (the Find enclosed in the second set of parentheses).

This will find only the Roman numerals I, II, and III. To find all instances up to 40 (XL) you could do:
([IVX]{1,}.^t)(*^13)
Note that the search will fail is there is no period after the number.

If the outline numbering is capital letters you could search for [A-Z]. If it is numbers, [0-9]. If there is a tab character you could add that to the search string using Special in the F&R dialog (or just use ^t). If it is a paragraph indent you could search for that using Format >> Paragraph in the F&R dialog. Just remember that searching for the paragraph formatting and such is "sticky", meaning that if you search for paragraph formatting indent 1" you will need to go back and clear that entry in the paragraph dialog box, or else F&R will limit itself to paragraphs with indent 1 (or 0 for that matter).

I'll leave it at this since I don't know for sure that it is what you are trying to do.

This looks like manual numbering but may be SEQ fields.
If manual numbering, you will need to remove the manual numbering. If SEQ fields you may want to continue using those instead of automatic multilevel list numbering. Otherwise, you would want to remove the SEQ fields. You can find out if you have SEQ fields by pressing Alt+F9 to toggle display of field codes. (Regardless of what you see, remember to toggle it back by pressing Alt+F9 a second time.