[parsec]

My girlfriend is using Word in Office X to type up some notes and is getting severely pissed off at the way it's doing its lists.

There are a lot of numbered lists that need to be typed out, but Word keeps trying to do all this crazy autoformatting which isn't even close to what she wants.

Instead of starting each list anew, new lists continue with strange numbering, and indents them really far into the page.

The only way to fix it is every time she types in a new list, she has to go to "bullets and numbering" and pick the bullets and numbering style she wants to use (i.e. 1, 2, 3), then click the "Customize" button to make sure the list is correctly indented etc.

The other option is to mess with the little tab slider things at the top of the window and put them in the right spots.

Needless to say, it's getting to be a huge pain in the ass. She's used to an old version of Word on Windows, where if you hit enter once, it continues the list for you (i.e. puts the next number in the list for you at the same level of indentation) - this works normally on the mac. But hitting enter again (talking about the Windows version now) will terminate the list and set the tabs / indentation back to normal. When she starts a new list, it's just that - a new list. Not so on the mac; what should be a new list sometimes starts at number 2, and gets indented way into the middle of the page.

Does anybody know what I'm talking about and/or have any solutions?

Thanks,

parsec

[torifile]

Your notes prayers are answered.

I love that program.

[car1son]

I believe word autoformat just appleist styles "list", "list number" and "list bullet" to text it recognizes as a list. (The current style can be seen in the formatting toolbar or palette).

To make the list style what she wants (I'm not sure why it's in the middle of the page) you can edit the definition by selecting "Style..." from the "Format" menu, select the style and click modify. (You can check "modify template" in the modify dialog so the changes apply to other documents as well. Might be best to make the changes in the current document until she has the hang of Styles.)

She can also turn off auto-formatting by selecting "Autocorrect" from the Tools menu and going to the "Autoformat as you type" tab. Uncheck "automatic bulletted lists" and "automatic nubered lists". Then you can manually apply the "List Numbered" or "List Bulletted" styles to paragraphs you want to format as lists, or click the Numbering or Bullets icon on the Formatting toolbar.

If the problem is progressively greater indenting of lists, the problem may be that the previous lists never end: This can happen is you continue entering text after a list by moving the cursor at the end of the last list item, typing text and manually formatting the margin back instead of changing to the Body Text or Normal style (or whatever your base style is). This makes new text part of the previous list, but with a local override of the usual list indenting. When a list is next invoked, it looks like a continuation of the previous list rather than a new list, and the numbering doesn't rest or the indentation increases.

Let me see if I can illustrate what that means:

Type into a new Word document:
1. First
2. Second
3. Third

Word recognizes this as a list, and the formatting changes (if autoformatting is on.) The style is now List Numbered or just List.

Now, with the insertion point below the third list item, you are still using the list style. To end the list, you should click the "numbering" icon on the formatting toolbar to turn it off.

You can explore what Style is in effect for any paragraph by displaying the formatting toolbar and simply moving the insertion point through the document, observing the style for each paragraph in the style pull-down.

I hope some of that is lucid, at least.

[cpac]

Originally posted by torifile:
Your notes prayers are answered.

I love that program.

I have to ditto this.

Word's is a pain in the ass when it comes to outlines.

Definitely go with OmniOutliner. SO much better for these purposes.

[parsec]

torifile and cpac: Thanks for the suggestion, I also think omnioutliner kicks ass, but she needs to leave all kinds of spaces for diagrams she's going to draw in after, and wants to be able to clearly see what each page is going to look like (where pages end etc.)

car1son: thanks for the detailed response. I hope at least one of your suggestions works.

[Arty]

I do a great deal of writing in Word on PCs and Macs and can never seem to get Word to "auto" format anything consistently.

In the large organisations I work with, it isn't uncommon to see people spend HOURS mucking about, re-formatting small two or three page documents.

I agree that if it is a lot of outlining, Omni is the way to go. Otherwise, I would strongly suggest that you turn off all the "features" of Word and do the lists and bullets manually.

[cpac]

Originally posted by parsec:
torifile and cpac: Thanks for the suggestion, I also think omnioutliner kicks ass, but she needs to leave all kinds of spaces for diagrams she's going to draw in after, and wants to be able to clearly see what each page is going to look like (where pages end etc.)

car1son: thanks for the detailed response. I hope at least one of your suggestions works.

she could type it up in OmniOutliner, and then export to .rft, and then set up pages and white space using TextEdit or Word.