Converting Automatic Numbering to Manual Numbering

Steve notes that Word's auto-numbering is not suitable for documents that are to be imported into page layout programs such as Adobe InDesign. He wonders if there is a quick way to replace auto-numbering with manual numbering, in the same way that you can convert field text to plain text.

The answer is yes, there is a quick way. Simply follow these steps:

1. Open the document whose numbering you want to convert. (You may want to open a copy of the document so that you don't mess up the original document.)
2. Press Alt+F11. Word displays the VBA Editor.
3. Press Ctrl+G. This opens the Immediate window. (If you get any other type of dialog box, such as the Find and Replace dialog box, then you aren't working in the VBA Editor; you are still in Word. Close the dialog box, make sure the VBA Editor is active, and then repeat this step.)
4. Type the following in the Immediate window:

ActiveDocument.Range.ListFormat.ConvertNumbersToText

5. Press Enter.

That's it; all the auto-numbered lists in your document are changed to manual numbering. If, instead, you want to affect only a limited portion of the document, make sure that portion is selected before you start the steps and then use this command in step 4:

Selection.Range.ListFormat.ConvertNumbersToText

For those familiar with macros, the difference here is that you are working with the Selection object (the text you have selected) instead of the ActiveDocument object (the entire document).

There are a couple of gotchas related to this approach, however. First, it may appear that your numbered lists no longer line up properly. This is because any custom tab stops set for the lists are deleted and Word reverts to using the default tab stops. This shouldn't be a huge problem, as you are doing this conversion in preparation for importing the document to a page layout program. (The tab stops in that program should take precedence over any you have set in Word.)

The second gotcha is that if you applied the auto-numbered styles using lists, then the numbering isn't really gone. You can apply it again by simply selecting the paragraphs in the lists and pressing Ctrl+Q.

If you would rather not mess with the VBA Editor, then there is another approach you can try out—save your document in RTF format. Many page layout programs (such as InDesign) use a different filter for importing RTF files, with the result that the numbered lists are converted automatically to regular numbers.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10248) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Converting Automatic Numbering to Manual Numbering.