SUMMARY:Understanding numbering, bullets, styles in Word97

["Amy G. Peacock" <apeacock -at- WOLFENET -dot- COM>]

Hello all,

Renee asked me to post a summary of the responses about my question
regarding Word 97 and its bullet/numbering feature. My original post
follows the summary in case anyone has had any divine inspiration
since then. :)

Lots of people said that Word 97 */#s was buggy and to get the service
patch from MS and that this might solve some problems, but not all of
them.

A few people told me that they type in their own */#s and avoid using
the auto feature at all.

The problem seems to be particularly painful when you try to do
nested sets of bullets and numbers - or some combination of them. This
is where most of my headaches come from.

Other suggestions were:

Create a template using a new style that you create yourself.
Use paragraph styles and not the */# feature.
Turn of the Autocorrect/numbering option.
Turn of any macros.
Uncheck the 'automatically update' option.

A book to check out: Word Annoyances.
Web sites: http://annoyances.org/
            http://mcc.com.au/sr1/
Newsletter: WOW (there's a link to this on the mcc web site)

About my using section breaks: most people couldn't really advise me
on this and said that using them would probably cause me more pain and
suffering. In general, they were wary about it...

For now I have decided to type in my own */#s. I'll do that until I
get it figured out. Once when I did this though, Word 'helped' me out
and formatted my numbered list for me. Gee, thanks... :/

Amy Peacock
techwriter & jewelrymaker
apeacock -at- wolfenet -dot- com

****** Original post *************************************************
May 14, 1998

Greetings all (an especially those of you who are expert Word 97
users),

Me again.
I've been working on a doc that is about 20 pages long. I have made
use of styles available to me in the normal template. I'm trying to
understand the relationship between the styles associated with
bulleted lists and numbered lists (List Bullet and List Number, I
think) and the 'Bullets and numbering...' option under Format, and the
number/bullets buttons on the tool bar.

How do they work together? Or do they? I find that I can't predict
how things are going to change when I go in and increase an indent
here - or change from numbers to bullets there... If I change one
thing then my doc suddenly has a mind of its own and I have bullets
where I had numbers, no indent where there used to be one, numbering
that doesn't flow (BTW, I do know about the Restart numbering and
continuous numbering options). The problem seems to stem from the fact
that I have lists within lists. Should I use only one of the
aforementioned options?

I have added sections breaks in an effort to keep changes that I make
to one list from affecting another list. I don't know if this is the
right thing to do.

That coupled with Word (on NT, I might add) contemplating its navel
today to no end...well, let's just say my frustration level is rather
high right now. I have probably said every four-letter expletive I can
think of twice today.

I hate to burden the list with my questions like this, but I don't have
anyone else to ask. I have looked in the archives and didn't find much
that helped me. Macros and such are beyond me. I went through this
same kind of frustration with Front Page but at least there I can go
in and tweak the HTML.

Any help would be appreciated. Send replies to me so I don't goop up
the list with this stuff.
Is it Friday yet?

Amy Peacock
techwriter & jewelrymaker
apeacock -at- wolfenet -dot- com

**************end original post******************