Help? MSWeird numbering question (long)

MSWeird numbering question

Well, two questions.

(1) Is there a user forum for Word, similar to Word Perfect Universe?

(2) Can anyone help with my specific problem, which is–

I have a document with many numbered lists. *Hundreds* of numbered lists.

Some of them are defined as a style, others are defined as an outline, and others I’m not sure about. The document came to me this way. I made editing changes and format changes, and now the numbering is all screwed up. To wit: the document is treating most of the numbered lists* as all part of the same list, so I get, in one section, (1), (2), (3) and in the next section, which should be 1-2-3 again, I get (4), (5), (6). Of course I can go format>bullets and numbering>restart numbering, and I have done this, and it worked fine–until I closed and reopened the document.
From word.mvps.org I got a VBA fix,** which is supposed to restart the numbering and certain markers. It did in fact start renumbering at the markers but ONLY at the markers so I got, for instance (1) (219) (220) and in the next paragraph (1) (222) (223). In other words, one, two, skip-a-few, 99, 100, [These are actual numbers.]

I would convert the whole thing to Word Perfect except about a quarter of it is in Chinese characters; I don’t know how the author got them, but they don’t convert. Or rather, they convert, but to different characters. That’s a worse problem than the numbering, because at least I can look at the numbering and know it’s wrong.

I would keep the whole 400+ page document open until I’m done editing, but as sure as I try that either (a) the computer will crash or (b) I will have to turn it off for some other reason and when I reopen the document it will be screwed up again.

*Of the many, many, many such numbered lists in this document, about half are wrong. This means that half are right. However, it being Word, I can’t go into the document and figure out what’s working correctly on the ones that are, and naturally I’m afraid to mess around with them on peril of them all going wrong.
**I have never, ever done VBA before. While the site provides complete code it does not really tell me how to apply it, or maybe it’s wrong. First it gives a macro to restart numbering, then it says, “This method can be used in combination with applying numbering using styles. For [new line]
Sub ListNumber ()…

And from there it goes into another macro. WFT?

Microsoft hosts a number of newsgroups on news.microsoft.com. It sounds like microsoft.public.word.numbering would be the best place for this question.

I don’t have any experience with this particular issue, but I would try dividing the document into several smaller ones. See if you can edit it successfully, then recombine the pieces when you’re done.

http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/index.asp

these guys have a great newsletter and the answers I’ve had from the regulars on their message board have been spot on.

cj