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Word 365 Numbered List Bug(?)

Anonymous
2018-02-23T12:47:23+00:00

Hi Everybody,

I've been building a standardisation document for work and have encountered an interesting bug in numbered lists. When using the default numbered list, the second step in is letters instead. When those letters get to 27 entries it goes to aa, which is fine. But then number 28 is bb instead of ab. It continues: cc, dd, ee, ff, etc. and at the 53rd entry it goes to aaa, bbb, ccc, etc.

Considering that office already has a common convention in use for more than 26 letters in Excel it seems odd that it doesn't go to aa, ab, ac, ad, etc., especially since that follows the base format of mathematics and this is basically counting.

I tried changing to the different letter-using lists, but they all show the same, even on lists with letters at different steps (the first step for example). The define custom list doesn't let you define what happens when it runs out of the base values (no need for numbers obviously, but for letters...)

Has anyone else encountered this and managed to find a way to make the "numbering" of the letters make sense?

Justin

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2018-02-24T00:39:35+00:00

See the Nifty Numbering Section of Cindy Meister's website at

http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/

She has a SET and IF field construction there that returns Excel type numbering.

{ Quote { Set ABC { = { ABC } + 1 } }{ SET ABC2 { IF { ABC } > 26 "{ IF { = MOD({ ABC }, 26) } = 1 "{ = { ABC2 } + 1 }" "{ ABC2 }" }" "{ ABC2 }" } }{ SET ABC1 { IF ABC1 < 26 "{ = { ABC1 } + 1 }" "1" } }{ If { ABC } < 27 "{ ABC1 \* ALPHABETIC }" "{ ABC2 \* ALPHABETIC }{ ABC1 \* ALPHABETIC }" } }

Note, you cannot just copy the above as CTRL+F9 must be used to insert each pair of field delimiters { }

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-02-23T14:08:02+00:00

    Hi Justin,

    Word 2016 doesn’t support the function you mentioned in the thread. So we suggest you go to Word’s Suggestion Box to submit feedback and vote for it, this will help us improve our products.

    Regards,

    Rosen

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-03-02T16:04:38+00:00

    I tried that today: it took ages to get working (I was missing a space after the two <).

    It seems to return just the one letter, then you need to copy and paste the entire field, resolve it, then update the field to get the next letter. Is there a better way? The list I've been working on is 58 entries long: it would take forever using that process?

    Also I don't know if it is just because I only updated the second field to step through the letters: but after Z it looped back to A, not AA.

    I have filled in a suggestion to fix this as Rosen suggested above as well.

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