Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Paragraph Numbers in Headers or Footers.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated November 10, 2020)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
Let's say that you have a rather long document—perhaps several hundred pages—and it consists of many numbered paragraphs. In your header or footer you would like to place the paragraph number of the first paragraph on the page.
Word provides a rather easy way you can do this using the STYLEREF field. The way you implement the solution, however, depends on how you have your paragraphs numbered. If you are using Word's numbering capabilities (from Format | Bullets and Numbering), then you should follow these steps if you want to place the paragraph number in the header:
{ STYLEREF Body Text \n }
These steps work because of the \n switch, which limits STYLEREF so that it displays only the paragraph number.
If you use a different numbering scheme for your paragraphs—such as manual numbers or perhaps SEQ fields—then the above approach will not work. Instead, you need to create a character style for your paragraph numbers and then apply it to all the numbers in the document. Then you can follow the above steps, but leave out the \n switch. You'll also change the style name in the field code so that it matches whatever character style you've used. For instance, if your style is NumStyle, you would use the following field code:
{ STYLEREF NumStyle }
Provided that NumStyle is a character style, applied only to your paragraph numbers, then when you collapse the STYLEREF field, it shows only the characters you've formatted with the style (your paragraph numbers).
It is interesting that the Word documentation indicates that the STYLEREF field works only with paragraph styles, giving the impression that it won't work with character styles. Testing has shown that this is misleading; STYLEREF will work just fine with character styles as described here.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (230) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Paragraph Numbers in Headers or Footers.
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