If you've ever typed a really long set of discovery answers/objections, you've seen language like this:

[Party] objects to this request on the grounds that it is vague, ambiguous, immaterial, irrelevant, not reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence ..."

In fact, every attorney I know has his/her own boilerplate discovery objections -- full paragraphs containing every possible objection one can make to a discovery request.

You don't want to type that over and over and over again for 37 different discovery requests, do you?

Good.  I don't want you to, either.  So I'm going to show you how to get out of it.  Without quitting your job.

One of my coworkers called me -- for, like, the umpteenth time  -- asking me to pull up document 389729 (not its real name) and "do that footer thing" (a.k.a. my famous footer trick, wherein I insert a three-column table into a document footer so the document number is on the left, the page number is in the middle, and maybe the date/time stamp for the latest draft is on the right).

My "footer thing" is getting to be really popular around the office, and I'll have to show it to you sometime. But there's a way around having to build new footers in documents repeatedly.

Early on in our Bulletproof Paragraph Numbering journey, Heather chimed in with this dilemma:

Our office typically uses headings when setting up multi-level lists and links them to styles. Unfortunately, as you know, doing that causes the style type to be linked when you go to modify styles.

Unfortunately, I have some very picky attorneys I work with who have exact specifications to their headings that don’t always work with Words functionality. For instance: ARTICLE 1. They want the text that follows ARTICLE 1. to be on the same line as the heading. They also want ARTICLE 1. to be bolded and underlined, HOWEVER, they don’t want the period bolded and underlined following ARTICLE 1. –> They also don’t want the text underlined and bolded.

As you can imagine, this proves very difficult since the paragraphs and characters are linked due to the fact that it is associated with a heading. With your vast storage of knowledge, can you think of a simpler way for me to set this up? They want headings to show up in and outline, or if necessary a TOC.

I clarified her attorney's requirements with her, and she followed up with an additional example:

Also, I have one attorney who would prefer:

ARTICLE 1. (ARTICLE Bolded, Underlined but no period underlined and bolded)
ARTICLE 1. DEFINITIONS. (DEFINITIONS BOLDED, not underlined)
ARTICLE 1. DEFINITIONS. Text (Text not underlined)

Another example:
4. (4 is Bolded)
4. Definitions (Definitions is Bolded and Underlined)
4. Definitions. (The Period is Bolded but not underlined)
4. Definitions. Text (The Text is plain no bold or underline)

It makes me want to pull my hair out!

I can completely sympathize! Those are both some pretty exacting specifications. Using Heather's attorneys' examples as inspiration, here's one example of what's possible:

Notice that:

• The "Section" headings are on the same line as the remainder of its related paragraph.
• The "Article" and "Section" headings are in all caps, bold and (at least the Sections) underlined within the text, but not within the Table of Contents.
• While you can't really see this above, both "Article" and "Section" can be cross-referenced (as initial caps and with context-appropriate formatting) within another paragraph in the document.

Pulling off distinct formatting of numbering, the lead-in headings, and the rest of the paragraph requires mastery of two techniques: Style Separators and Numbering versus Heading formatting.

This time, we're going to deal with multilevel numbering with text that may (or may not) need to eventually be included in a Table of Contents. When I say some of the text "may or may not be included in a Table of Contents", that's because (unlike the numbering to covered in the previous tutorials) each level of this numbering will be linked to Heading Styles. This adds a new level of complexity to the proceedings, but it also switches on some pretty cool features and capabilities, such as:

• Including headings in an automated Table of Contents (mentioned that already)
• Reviewing the document's structure within the Navigation View
• Moving entire sections of a document around without cut-and-paste (again, via the Navigation View)
• Automatically updating cross-references between paragraphs/sections (for instance, if you renumber Article II to Article III, any related references to Article II get updated including, if you like, noting whether the new Article III is "above" or "below" the reference)
• Being able to repeat the entire text of a particular numbered heading elsewhere in the document (example: "see Section 3.01 Calculating Allocations") without having to manually adjust those references when titles change
• Revising the font/paragraph styling of a particular level heading in one series of steps (rather than going through the entire document and revising each heading manually)

Have I missed any benefits? Probably. Once you start embedding automated fields like paragraph numbering into your documents, you can find all sorts of ways to automatically update and cross-reference. If you're producing long, complex documents, this comes in really handy.

How is this different from the type of automatic paragraph numbering I covered in the last lesson? Look at the difference between this:

... and this:

Some of the differences will be obvious; some, not. In the first example, every paragraph is numbered. In the second example, only the headings are numbered, while the related paragraphs underneath are not.

What's not apparent from casual observation is that the second example actually uses the Heading Styles to create the numbered text. If you've been following along with this series, you'll remember that I've very carefully avoided linking any of those numbering levels with a particular Style. In this example, the numbering will be explicitly linked to Heading Styles to create an outline. That's what's going to enable a lot of the benefits noted above.

In the ​previous lesson in this series, we went through the basics of setting up a multilevel paragraph numbering scheme for inline numbering ("inline" meaning that the number appears at the beginning of the paragraph and that each paragraph has a separate number). This is the kind of numbering that Word automatically applies (once you start the numbering scheme) whenever you press the Enter key to start a new paragraph.

So, to refresh your memory from last time, here's what kind of numbering we're covering in this lesson:

It was one of those emails that I knew I'd get sooner or later:

When indenting a paragraph for a quote in a motion for instance, is there a way to indent both the left and right margins of the paragraph using a keyboard shortcut? I seem to recall Ctrl+M in WordPerfect, but don't know of a built-in shortcut for MS Word.

Yeah, I've kind of been bummed about that, too.

The short answer is, no. Word didn't considerately offer up a built-in shortcut key that'll automatically indent both the right and left margins for an extended quote. I do not know why. It is a mystery for the ages. (Okay, maybe not quite that dramatic.)

But where Microsoft has failed, you can succeed. Here are three suggestions I had: