You can easily add numbered lists in Word, and there is even a built-in multilevel list to give you numbered heading levels. However, if you want to do anything more sophisticated, it’s not quite so simple. Suppose you want to have numbered procedural lists, or itemised lists with sublists? Of course, you can apply numbering each time to your blocks of text. The clever way is to create a multilevel list linked to the paragraph styles you use in that block. That way, the numbering happens automatically every time you use those styles. I am assuming that you are already using paragraph styles that have been created for specific circumstances within your content. If you are not doing this, you really should, and I have other help topics that explain why and show how you can do this.

The following video tutorial shows how to create a multilevel list for the paragraphs styles ProcTitle, ProcStep, and ProcSubStep. These styles are used to format blocks of text that describe a stepwise procedure to carry out a specific task. There are a lot of these in most task-driven documentation, so an automatic way of formatting them saves a lot of time.

Watch the video

A few tips:

1. For list levels 2 and more, you usually want to select Restart List After and choose the previous level number.
2. The text indent and tab stop for a level should generally be the same value.
3. The number alignment should generally be the same as the previous level’s text indent.
4. Do not use the same paragraph style in more than one multilevel list. Not only does Word get horribly confused, it normally means that your list logic is wrong in some way.
5. Do not add any indents to the definition of the paragraph styles you use in multilevel lists; always let the list definition control the indentation.
6. For paragraph styles that might appear between the multilevel list paragraphs, you will need to define indents as required.