Urgent - numbering issue in Word - help!

[Sweetcakes]

Hi there



I'm having a nightmare with some documents that I am trying to reformat as drafted by someone else. Basically they're very long and horrible, and as a short term fix I need to get them working correctly, but the way they've been drafted at the moment, is not right!

Basically, the first part of the document is entitled for arguments sake "Section 1 - ...." with numbering starting at Level Heading 3 i.e. 1.1. There is then a page break where "Section 2 - ..." starts, this part of the document has no numbering in it. Then we have another page break and "Section 3 - ..." starts - this section has numbering in it, which should start at 3.1, 3.2 etc.

The document has hidden text it in which needs to be deleted before sending via email to clients, so if I put in Heading 2 style numbering to get the 1, 2 & 3 heading levels as hidden text, when the hidden text is deleted, they are deleted, so the numbering in section 3 jumps back to continue to the numbering in section 1.

I've tried just entering a blank line "heading 2" style trying to trick it by back-tabbing to delete the number in the hope that it would recognise that there was a heading number style there, but that didn't work either - basically I have 1.1-1.14 in section 1, no numbering in section 2, then section 3 should start 3.1, but however I try it, it just starts at 1.15.

To make matters worse, there are 4 or 5 documents which when completed, need to be merged into this one document with consecutive numbering applying automatically, so I can't even manually set the numbering to start at "whatever number" because I'm not sure when the other docs are merged, what numbering they're going to start from as sections may be deleted ... nightmare!

Does anyone know if there's a solution to this and how it can be applied - desperate for any help/an answer - thank you