I am hoping for some word gurus out there to have a method to insert a line before a heading as a paragraph style. I am running out of ideas on how to do this in word.

I want to add a vertical line eg 18pt to the left of the section heading and be 60 pt high.
I need the section heading to be real Heading numbers for TOC

Ideally this would be paragraph style so you can just select that style and keep going on the document. Rather than hand building it for each section.
This is easy to do in InDesign with paragraph rules, but not so word.

What I am trying to achieve is attached..........
Thanks in advance....

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Screenshot 2023-09-20 140652.png (3.6 KB, 21 views)

You could create an AutoText or AutoCorrect entry and use that to repeat the formatting.
You could set a paragraph style with a left border. Set a distance for a border.

Cross-posted at Put a vertical line to the left of the numbering in a Paragraph style for a heading - Microsoft Community Hub


For cross-posting etiquette, please read: A Message to Forum Cross-Posters A message to forum cross posters - Excelguru

I'd go with the paragraph style. I've used that method before and it works well.

Hi Charles..
already been there with the paragraph border , and this is pretty close unfortunately the border size seems to max out at 6pt and i need 18pt to match my branding restrictions.

The arbitrary limits in word can get quite frustrating.

The limits only apply to the dialog and can be overcome by editing the xml for the style definition.

NOTE: If you later make edits to the style you must stay out of the borders and shading
dialog or you will overwrite your edit.

First, apply a 6pt border in the correct colour and at the correct distance. Save the template/document.
The simplest method from this point is to use 7-zip or NanaZip to open the document archive so that you can edit the files.
Open the styles.xml from the word folder for editing. I use Visual Code but a text editor will also work.
You'll need to find the second instance of "heading 1" to get the style definition. See screenshot.
The part of the definition you need is: and you need to edit the parameter "w:sz". You will note that the value of this is the border size in points multiplied by 8. So change the value of 48 to 144, save the file and close the editor. If you are using 7-zip or NanaZip you will be asked if you want to update the archive with the changes.
As you will see in the final screenshot you now have an 18pt border 18pts from the paragraph.

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	Screenshot 2023-09-21 091653.png (46.6 KB, 15 views)
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Bravo Italophile
This is a game changer!

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thank you 1 Million times.
I never thought it was possible and has opened my eyes to the world inside of word documents..

Thank you Italophile for your Genius answer.

It's a technique that I have used for some years which I also use to apply inside borders to first and last columns for Table Styles.

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Screenshot 2023-09-22 124211.png (35.4 KB, 9 views)

I've added a link to post#6 in my page on Understanding Styles, if for no other reason than that I may be able to find it again. If I knew your real name, Italophile, I would credit you there, as well. You've made a valuable contribution to the Word community here. I expect it will also lead to other discoveries on things that can be done in XML.

There are a number of things that can be done in XML that can't be done in the UI. Most are well documented on the internet. One resource is John Korchok's series on XML Hacking at his Brandwares.com site. Whilst the focus of this is PowerPoint there are some Word specific articles, as well as articles on extending Office Theme colours that apply across the suite, and some PowerPoint specific techniques that can be applied to Word, e.g. shape locking.
I haven't included a direct link to the page as I have previously found that deep linking to his site can be unreliable.

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Screenshot 2023-09-23 110304.png (47.1 KB, 9 views)

Thank you. I am well aware of John's contributions.

John Korchock - Best Practices - much about PowerPoint, some about Word - Start here and look at Older Posts
I have a number of bookmarks and like you have found that sometimes things move around. The link above is simply to the last post on the site and the way I titled it in my bookmarks.

Here is one on styles: Managing Styles with XML editing by John Korchok
It does not have the border trick you demonstrated.

I also have his book OOXML Hacking.

It doesn't need to. Once you understand that you can edit the xml to get around limitations you learn by experimentation. That's how John learned.

But you only experiment when you have a need to do something. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. I only learned to modify the border in this way because a client had the same intractable design issue. Similarly, I only experimented with the missing options in table styles because I needed to create a single table style that could be used to produce multiple table designs for different purposes by simply toggling the style options.