Microsoft Word provides several mechanisms that assist to number objects like headings, paragraphs and lists in a document
There is ample explanatory, commentary, and tutorial material for Word numbering. However, a paper written by John McGhie in 2000 – Word Numbering Explained – remains one of the best. Using a dry, humorous writing style, the paper somehow manages to be thorough, but without tethering it to the software version or file format of the day. What McGhie makes clear, is that the information necessary to comprehend how numbering works in Word is simply unavailable through the user interface. Implicitly, this leaves users with a choice. Invest in many hours of education to gain the skills for properly wrangling templates, content and users. Or live without numbering. Or live with a mishmash of overlapping lists, conflicting styles, manual numbering restarts and overrides and cross-references lacking integrity
In making the argument that Word makes numbering harder by leaving out information, it would be disingenuous to argue that the problem is simple, therefore the solution is obvious. The problem is not simple, and at present the only solution is to comprehend the details.
What this page, and the Allette List Analyzer is attempting to provide is enough information to remediate documents where the numbering is failing. If you really want to understand what is going wrong, read the John McGhie paper.
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Think about ordering hundreds, or thousands of entities.
Coordinating numbering in Word, or any publishing tool, if a simple explanation were possible, a simple interface would also be possible. Or to say it another way, both the explanations and the interfaces are hard because the problem is hard. Microsoft tries to address this complexity by hiding it, but this only makes the behaviour and results harder to understand and increases frustration. To help users, Word provides many options to work around, or override the numbering. Unfortunately, these are short-term fixes with long-term consequences that only help users to dig a deeper hole.
One way to understand numbering in documents is to consider a race with hundreds, or thousands of competitors. The clear, consistent assignment and management of numbers to those racing is critical to getting accurate results. While there may be legitimate reasons to swap or substitute numbers during the race, without very careful management, the results will lack integrity and create confusion. If the rules of the race are known Changes made mid-race will require additional checking add an overhead when determining the results only delay.
What the Allette Systems List Analyzer does is identify every numbering change in a document. Is the change right, or wrong? The List Analyzer cannot say. What it can say is that the document would work better with no changes. Documents that use list styles for numbering without "Direct" or "Override" numbering, will have consistency and integrity with much less effort than is otherwise necessary.
For this reason, to quickly assess a document after processing through the List Analyzer, simply look at the number of colors in the docx comments, or the HTML report.