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Why are outline numbered list limited to 9 levels?
Being suspicious is (sometimes) a good strategy, I suspect. g
-- Stefan Blom Microsoft Word MVP "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message ... I'm always suspicious of people who say they need more than nine levels because I've found so many of them that think they need Heading 1 for the first heading (at a given level), Heading 2 for the second, etc. It's a bit more difficult to believe, but some people will even set up outline numbering levels for simple lists, setting the numbering to start from 2 on Level 2, 3 on Level 3, etc. So I try to probe a bit to bring out any information that might confirm that this misconception is involved. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Stefan Blom" wrote in message ... Too many list levels would be equally confusing for the writer, I believe. :-) -- Stefan Blom Microsoft Word MVP "Jezebel" wrote: Caveat lector! This is functionality to make life easier for *writers*. "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message ... You need more than nine levels of numbering in a single list? Gack! I wouldn't want to be the one who was trying to figure out the 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1 level of subheadings. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Jim Perullo" Jim wrote in message news Just another voice in the noise of the crowd: I could definitely use more levels - stopping at nine (9) is quite limiting for Bill-of-Materials work and other logical listing purposes. "J. Knoernschild" wrote: Two things - one, isn't it Microsoft's responsability to include this available option as they need to appeal to many users - and not just limit a feature because only 60,000 people might need it out of 2 million. Second, how can you customize styles or templates for automatic outlined numbering greater than 10 when word is limited to 9? "Herb Tyson [MVP]" wrote: I'm guessing that the need for more than 9 levels is rare. Most users seldom need more than 4 or 5 levels, as most. Note that Word's built-in Heading levels go only from 1 to 9 as well. That said, almost anything is possible in Word if one is willing to invest the time/money to setting it up. If your company routinely needs 12-13 numbering levels, and if they're committed to staying with Word, it would make sense to develop templates that do this for you -- including styles, tools and macros to make it transparent to the user. -- Herb Tyson MS MVP Please respond in the newsgroups so everyone can follow along. http://www.herbtyson.com "J. Knoernschild" wrote in message ... Suzanne, I strongly believe that Microsoft should come out with an update to fix this. At Boeing we must write Performance Specifications all the time and to not have more than 9 levels is impossible to create a spec. Often times are specs go as deep at 12-13 levels. I rely on the custom numbering schemes when writing a spec and not having this feature limits my use of Microsoft Word. I must say that I am rather disappointed in the reasoning for not making this list larger. Thanks, J "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote: Really the best place to pursue this inquiry is in the .numbering NG. The regulars who post there know far more about numbering than I ever will. I remain skeptical, however, that the functionality you're seeking was ever available in Word. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "F. James Little" wrote in message ... Suzanne, Thanks for the reply. I had actually thought of trying to nest the lists, but when I tried it, I was unable to get it to work... (I'm sure there is some trick to it.) When I tried, it would continue to treat the nested list as a continuation of the Parent list, and would not allow any further indentations to occur. A reply from Robert to this same question on the Word.Numbering forum contained a link which may have offered a solution to the nesting issue. If you know of a simple method using just the interface to nest list, I would love to hearit! Thanks again for your help. F. James Little Sr. Software Engineer "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote: You can have as many level of indents and bullets as you like because there is no issue with restarting numbering after a certain level. You can apply any bullet you like to any style you like with any indent you like. You could even, I imagine, have multiple outline-numbered lists (nested), but you can't have more than nine levels within a given list. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "F. James Little" wrote in message ... Graham, I would have to disagree with you that an outline 9 0r more levels deep would be incomprehensible. I would think that it would be very much dependent upon the intent of the document and its intended document. In the particular case I am attempting to document the architecture of an object oriented software module by creating an outline of pseudopodia. (This to be accompanied by UML diagrams developed in Visio.) The logic of this particular module easily goes to more than 20 levels deep, and this is not a particularly complicated module. To an audience of fellow Software Engineers, I can assure you that the resulting pseudopodia outline would be completely comprehensible. In any case, I believe that setting the limit to 9 levels is somewhat arbitrary, and I believe that Microsoft should not place limits upon users within its applications unless there is a resource limitation or documented requirement to do so. Given how buggy the numbered outline seems to be in Word, perhaps it is in fact a resource limitation that forces the limit to be 9. It seems to me that earlier versions of the MS Word supported more, if not unlimited, levels when bullets and numbers could be set to multilevel prior to the advent of the specific numbered outline option. (The numbered outline may have been available in previous versions, but if it was it was not the default as it is today; the simple bulleted format was the default which could be customized to multiple levels.) If I am correct on the above, then this would seem to be a case of lost functionality. (A major, "your going to hell" sin in my industry.) In any case, if Word is not going to support more than 9 levels, why then does customization dialog present the level selection in a scrollable list control with all 9 levels visible in the list? The scrollbar is disabled because there is nothing to scroll to, but it is nonetheless there. If there was not the intent to support more levels, why then allow the scrollbar to be present al all! It is very confusing to the user in that it gives the impression that there may be a circumstance when the scroll bar may be active. (Believe me, I have spent the better part of a morning looking for just such a circumstance.) If the Microsoft Word development team did not intend there to ever be more than 9 levels, then it would have been a simple matter through code to prevent the listbox from displaying a vertical scroll bar! (I believe the vertical scrollbar is a holdover from previous versions where more than 9 levels were supported.) So, my question still stands... why does MS Word not support more than |
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