Formatting Lists in Microsoft Word

Formatting numbered and bulleted lists in Microsoft Word can be a minefield for the unwary. Word makes it easy to use them by just clicking on one of the buttons in the formatting toolbar, but making any changes to Word's default format can produce unexpected results that are hard to correct. 

It is possible to create lists that are stable and have a format other than Word's default (for example, that aren't indented from the text margin) by using the multilevel list feature. The Office Watch website has recently published an article that explains how to do this. This is the technique that I used at the TSX. It does work and is reasonably stable, as long as you follow a few simple rules.

• Never use the buttons in the ribbon to format your lists. Instead, use the paragraph styles defined in your template. (If you aren't using a template, see this post). 
• Always paste text from another document as plain text. This is especially important if the text is part of a list. 

If you are still having problems with your list formatting, you can create numbered lists by using sequence fields. This technique requires more care when updating documents, but it is dead stable; in many years of using Word, I have never had a instance of document corruption using sequence fields.