How to number captions in the appendix

Question

Hi everyone,

As part of my role, I work with a lot of external writers to put together often lengthy reports, written in several different chapters and appendices. Each report often includes numerous tables and captions throughout the body of the text and in the appendices.

We have an issue with the captioning in the appendices which I am told was not a problem a couple of years ago (before I started in the role). When we insert captions for tables or figures in the appendices, they are automatically numbered to the most recent chapter number in the body of the text, rather than the appendix lettered heading. Our appendix headings are separate to our normal numbered headings (1-9) because our reports are published as PDFs online. That being said, they are still based off the Heading 1 Style and appear as a heading 1 in the navigation pane in word and PDF readers like Acrobat.

I am aware of some ways around this issue: creating a separate caption heading (i.e. 'Table A.' or 'Figure B.') or right-clicking the caption number and editing the field to link to the appendix heading. However, as our reports are written by external writers working in one of our templates, this often complicates the whole process and the documents sent back to us then require significant intervention on our part.

Is there a way we can revert our templates to how they used to function so if a writer were to insert a caption in the appendices it would automatically number itself from the most recent heading?

Thanks in advance! We are all very, very eager for a solution to this issue!

Answer 1

Good point; I see that I hadn't allowed for that. You would still have to include the \r switch in the first caption in each appendix.

Answer 2

Actually, if you are willing to do a little work, you should be able to create a custom appendix title style and a custom caption label this way:

1. Create a new heading style (not based on the built-in headings), assign it Level 1, and apply auto numbering (this can be a new list or an unused level of the same list used for the main headings, with indents and tabs adjusted as needed).
2. Create a caption label from scratch as follows:
   1. Type "Table" or "Figure" and a space.
   2. Insert a STYLEREF field referencing the paragraph number of the appendix heading style you created.
   3. Insert the desired separator (period, hyphen) and then a SEQ field with a unique label (it could be SEQ Appendix, say, or SEQ AppTable and SEQ AppFigure if you're using both).
   4. Select the entire caption label and save it as an AutoText entry for ease of insertion.
3. The STYLEREF fields in these labels will update automatically. The SEQ fields will be in sequence when inserted but will need to be updated manually (with F9) if additional captions are inserted between captions.

Answer 3

Take a look at: How to number headings and figures in Appendixes in Microsoft Word by Shauna Kelly

Answer 4

Thanks Charles,

I've already had a look at this page on Shauna Kelly's website and although this solution fixes our issue it makes a new issue with the navigation pane in PDF readers (which is how most people would read the reports we publish). When looking at the report structure in a navigation pane, it makes the appendices look like subsections of the preceding chapter (you can see what I mean in Figure 1 of the webpage you linked in your answer).

Our reports need to be as accessible as possible so having the appendices appear as separate chapters in the navigation page rather than subsections is a must for us.

Thanks again for the speedy reply!

Answer 5

You can set up custom headings and use them for your appendix. What you lose is the ability to include appendix numbering with captions and have the captions restart following a particular heading level, because the restart switch (\s level) only works with the built-in headings. Instead, you would have to manually restart the relevant captions by adding the \r switch to their field codes.