This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Next week, we’ll look at the text you write in lists and how to make sure that works clearly and appropriately. We’ve learned how to set up and customise bulleted and numbered lists. Then you can go ahead and crate a new list style that will appear in your Styles on your Home tab, and can be used for lists in just this document, or documents from now on. If you want to define a style for all of the lists in your document, or a new List Style to use in all documents forever, choose Define New List Style. Choose this if you just want to change one list in your document. If you select Define New Mulitlevel List you will be given a new set of options. So this gives you the chance to choose between different multi-level list formats and to define your own. This one’s a bit of a swizz, I think – it gives you a tiny arrow on the right, but it doesn’t actually matter where on the button you click you will still get the same menu. To do this, we use the Multilevel List button. To go just that little bit deeper into customisation, you can also fully customise how the sub-bullets work and even set a new Style for this document or all future documents. You can do this with the numbers, too, allowing you to choose between letters, Arabic numbers and Roman numerals:Īgain, you can define your own new number format if you want to.
If you click on Define New Bullet, you can even upload your own images to use as bullet points: useful if you’re creating a document that needs to be on brand with the rest of your brand identity, for example. … and you’ll get a choice of different bullet markers you can use. Try clicking on the one on the bullet button … The bullet and number button each have a tiny arrow on the right-hand side of the button. That’s fine, because you can customise them. You may not like the standard bullet points you’re given by Word. How do I customise my bullets and numbering? There’s another way to do this (of course there is!) – get your cursor just before the first letter of the first word of the line you want to indent and hit the Tab key on your keyboard. You’ll see the bullet point itself (or the number) change when you do this. What if you want nested bullet points in sub-categories? That’s fine – put your list into bullets, then select just the line you want to change and click on the Increase Indent key to move it along one. You can do the same but hit the number button to the right of the bullets button – now we get a numbered list: Once we have the lines highlighted, we can click on the bullets button (just in the middle of the button for the time being) to make the highlighted lines into bullet points: So in this example, we want to leave the first line alone and highlight the other ones: To make a list bulleted, you need to highlight the areas you need to change. So, here’s a plain list without any bullet points. These are the buttons you need to make your bullet pointed lists. One has a list of dots, one has a list of numbers, one has an indenting list of numbers, and two have paragraphs and arrows: Then, look at the Paragraph section and you’ll find a set of useful little buttons.
It’s Word Tips time and today I’m going to talk about bullet points – why we use them and how to use and format them.