May I suggest manual numbering?

Hi Ivan,

Word's Heading Styles will do that - simply set up a template with the required formatting and, when you get a document where the
formatting's all over the place, simply copy the text & paste it as unformatted text into a new document based on your template.
Then go through it and apply the appropriate heading styles to the various paragraphs. The most you'll then need to do is to delete
the 'hard-coded' paragraph numbers that came across with the original. From then on, if you want to add or delete paragraphs, the
numbering will automatically update as needed.

Cheers

Hi there!

Actually, macropod did moreor less answer your question--the only
decent way to do it is using styles. By your response I get the
impression that you might not be real familiar with them.

Try this on your document, view it in "Normal" view then under
Word -> Preferences -> View -> Window, set the Style Area Width
value to something other than the default 0 value (another one of
MS's absolutely idiotic defaults IMHO) such as .8 to 1.0 inches
or thereabouts.

Now you may be able to see part of your problem. All of he first
level paragraphs should ideally have the same style name, all of
the second the same name as well but different from the first,
and so on. The number lists being used should be defined in those
style and NOT applied using the numbering or bullet buttons. I
suspect that you may have a mix of styles, or everything is a
"Normal" style with each paragraph being highly custom and
disjoint from the others.

In the example you gave below, you have at LEAST 3 different
number lists being used (instead of a single outline number list
for all). Conceptually, you would think that the solution would
be to select the autonumbers on the paragraphs that seem to be
out of sequence and change them to the same autonumbers being
used in the other paragraphs. Unfortunately, the way MS designed
the number list galleries and the "Numbering" button, this is
(for all intents and purposes) impossible.

When you have styles defined with outline number lists (e.g.,
Heading 1, Heading 2, etc), all you do is select all of the level
1 paragraphs and apply the appropriate style. Then do the same to
the next level paragraphs.

Anyway, the bottom line is, in spite of how rigorously MS has
tried to Hide the core construct of their tool (i.e., styles) in
order to "simplify" it, anyone that does not familiarize
themselves with styles are doomed to continued confusion as to
why they can't seem to control their documents.

Hope this helps some

- Jeff