Simple Lists
Now, somewhere in the document, let's find a sequence of paragraphs in a numbered list. Let's say there are five of them, and they are paragraphs 43 to 48 in the document. Each of them has a tag indicating that it is a member of a list, and a pointer to List Template 23, which formats that list.
Now for the exciting bit: There can be more than one list in the document. "Of course there can," you're thinking. "Any technical manual has lots of little procedures expressed as numbered steps. Maybe five to seven items in each, and maybe one list every couple of pages."
Oh if only it were that simple...
In Word, you can indeed have multiple lists. However, each "list" can have more than two "ends." That sounds absurd, right? That's because it is...
Let's take a typical technical procedure: ten pages and six sets of numbered steps. The first three sets of numbered steps are all members of the same list. The list restarts at "1" three times: at the first paragraph of each of the three sets of numbered steps. The second three sets of numbered steps are also all members of the same list. Again, they each restart at "1" on the first paragraph of each set of numbered steps. To Word, that document contains two lists, not six.
The key distinction I am making is that the thing Word calls a numbered list is a larger structure than that which you or I know as a numbered list. Word considers a numbered list to be what you or I might describe as a "family" of numbered lists.
Illustration of Simple Lists
Think of a sporting goods shop that sells billiard balls. On one shelf, it has several boxes of balls by one manufacturer. Each ball has a number painted on it, as billiard-balls must have. On another shelf, the shop has more boxes of balls by a different manufacturer. Moreover, on a third shelf, three boxes by yet another manufacturer.
What you and I call a "numbered list" is one box of balls. Microsoft Word uses the name "list" for the entire shelf. Microsoft has never been shy about changing the English language to suit itself...
There may be several shelves of balls in the shop. Each set of numbered steps in the document may be a member of a different list. Or there may be only one shelf. Each numbered list in the document may be a member of the same list.
Unfortunately, that last case is unlikely to be true if we have a document that needs fixing. There is likely to be quite a large number of lists in the document. There's a celebrated bug, reported in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, which explains that things get a bit uncertain when a document contains more than 200 List Templates...
But it can get worse...
Any given paragraph in the document may be a member of any of the lists. If we have seven paragraphs numbered 1 through 7, there is no guarantee that they are all members of the same list. They could each be a member of a different list: one list starts at "1", the next starts at "2", the next starts at "3" ... you get the idea...
Oh, but it can get worse...
How can we tell which list a particular paragraph resides in? Sigh... we can't, unless we use VBA. Short of using Word 2000 to save the document to HTML and reading the code, there is no other way to tell which list a particular paragraph or set of paragraphs currently resides in. We can make some guesses, and in the FAQ about fixing numbering, we will tell you how to improve the accuracy of your guesses, and how to ensure that a given set of paragraphs belongs to a specified list. However, short of saving the document out to HTML and reading the code, there is no way to discover what is wrong.
