[Athen] Numbered headings in Word: bug, or my goof?

[Christine Robinson]

Hi all -

I've been working on a policy manual, attempting to remediate it for accessibility. This is my first time working with a long-ish document (31 pages) that uses numbered headings that follow traditional outline levels. I've run into a problem with Word's automatic numbering, and I'm not sure whether it's a bug in Word, or whether I'm doing something wrong.

When I was sent the original document, I cleared all the formatting out of it, copied and pasted the text into a new Word document, and created a new set of headings as follows:

*         Heading 1 for the title

*         Heading 2 for Roman numerals in an outline

*         Heading 3 for uppercase letters in an outline

*         etc.

When I start applying headings, initially everything is fine and dandy. However, as I get farther down in the document, Word keeps wanting to change my headings' numbering, so that if, for example, I have headings something like...

I. words words

A.      words words

1.       words words words

2.       words words

B.       blah blah


Then, when I get into the subtopics for section B, Word insists on continuing numbering from section A:
I. word words

A.      words words

1.       words words words

2.       words words

B.       blah blah

3.       blah blah

4.       blahdy blah

...and the farther I get in the document, the worse it gets.

I can go into the numbering menu manually, and set it to restart numbering, and that works early in the document. But as I keep going, Word ignores my attempts to restart numbering, or it accepts my numbering for that subtopic, but it also changes the numbering in previous sections, so then I have to go back and re-fix those. I don't know whether I'm doing something wrong, or whether it's just a bug in Word.

My bottom-line question: Since Word seems determined to continue numbering from previous sections instead of restarting numbering, am I doing something wrong, or is that a bug in Word that requires my awkward work-arounds?

Thanks!
Chris


Christine Robinson | Technical Trainer/Writer | Center for Teaching Excellence
Georgia Gwinnett College | 1000 University Center Lane | Lawrenceville, GA 30043

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/pipermail/athen-list/attachments/20170830/19d5030c/attachment.html>