Technical Communication Center

© Ugur Akinci

Imagine you would like to insert a series of “POINT TO REMEMBER” notes into your technical document. But there are three tough conditions to meet:

1. These notes are not styled with any of the existing paragraph styles.
2. You want them to be numbered sequentially: ”POINT 1 TO REMEMBER”, ”POINT 2 TO REMEMBER”, etc.
3. When you insert a new ”POINT TO REMEMBER” note in between two existing notes, or add a new one to the beginning or end of the sequence, you want MS Word to update the sequence correctly with just a simple procedure, if not automatically.

How would you do it? Word’s little-known and little-used SEQ Field Numbering Code comes to the rescue!

Follow these steps:

1) Imagine you have the document below and you’d like to insert ”POINT TO REMEMBER” notes at the designated locations:

2) Insert your cursor where you’d like the serial number to appear; right after the word “POINT” and one blank.

3) Press Ctrl+F9 to display the CURLY BRACKETS:

4) Type “SEQ Point“:

5) Right-click on the code and from the pop-up menu select Update Field:

The first independent sequence number will be inserted automatically:

6) Repeat the same procedure to insert the second POINT TO REMEMBER note number:

CAUTION: Now watch what happens when we insert a new note IN BETWEEN notes 1 and 2:

As you can see, MS Word did not update the third number properly: it’s still displayed as “2″ instead of “3″.

Do the following to update all SEQ numbers in one move:

Press Ctrl+a, then press F9. When the Update Table of Contents dialog box is displayed, select the “Update page numbers only” option button and then click OK.

All the SEQ field code numbers will be updated properly: