Fields are one of those features in Word that Microsoft has tried very hard to hide. It was my experience over my technical writing career that perhaps one user in a hundred knew what they were and how to use them. That's unfortunate because they are one of Word's more powerful features.
SEQ or sequence fields are useful for creating arrays of list items or for fixing numbering problems. This article from the excellent Office Watch site is a good introduction to SEQ fields.
Whenever someone has a numbering or list problem in Microsoft Word, the solution usually revolves around the little known but oh so flexible SEQ code.
SEQ lets you do things in Word that aren’t possible with the numbered or multi-level list features. Even the powerful ListNum field has to give way to the power of SEQ.
Like most Word field codes, it’s a little clumsy but it’s very flexible. SEQ is well worth learning because it’s the key to solving more complicated numbering issues.
The {SEQ} field code lets you create almost any numbering system you need, anywhere in a document. Even mixing up different lists or sequences in ways that other Word features can’t cope with.
I often used SEQ fields to create numbering sequences that were difficult to do with Word's standard numbering features or to fix numbering that had broken. That was an all-too-frequent experience with documents that had multiple contributors.
I wrote this article to explain how to use SEQ fields for simple paragraph numbering, but you can create quite complex numbering sequences for both headings and lists. Once you set them up, they just work, unlike Word's standard list numbering.
No comments:
Post a Comment