Microsoft Word is certainly not the best tool for documenting requirements. But with a few adjustments, we can at least get a reliable numbering scheme for requirements and reasonable and robust traceability of requirements. Law firms use numbered lists daily to prepare contracts, briefs, letters and memos. Word makes it relatively easy to enable and customize numbering. You can create simple numbered lists, such as A, B, C, and 1, 2, 3. You can also customize these lists to configure specific numbering styles for your company and practice group. Multi-level lists such as I, A, 1 are managed through Word`s hierarchical numbering feature, which is discussed later in this chapter. Many companies rely on numbered lists to create contracts and briefs. Like numbered lists, numbered hierarchical lists can be customized. A very common numbering scheme involves the first level of the numbering scheme to be centered, with the text underneath as shown in this example: CK Note: The Word 2007 – 2013 interface has a different auto-numbering scheme which, I`ve been told, is much less prone to corruption.

Microsoft Word 2010 Bible by Herb Tyson, MVP. However, the numbering in these later versions is still very imperfect. I always recommend following Shauna Kelly`s step-by-step guide (see above) if you`re setting up numbering in a template or document that is likely to be heavily modified. If you start without this and end up with a „spaghetti numbering”, fixing it will be a very big task! Therefore, I use a different technique to cross-reference requests from an external Word file. Word supports a field type called INCLUDETEXT. This box allows me to paste a piece of text from a bookmark of another Word file. The syntax is {INCLUDETEXT „[filename]” [bookmarks]}. Unfortunately, the file name has to be an absolute path, which hinders the team`s collaboration with that file. The solution is this: If you know in advance that you need hierarchical numbering for your paragraphs, you must choose the correct format in the Bullets and Numbering dialog box. If you apply one of the predefined styles to one or more paragraphs that already contain bullets or numbers, it is applied to the entire list. There is a special tab for contour numbers – the Numbered Outline tab. Word includes a special sequencing box that you can use to perform all kinds of numbering.

You can even use the SEQ field to create broken numbered lists. (A broken numbered list is a list in which paragraphs of a different format interrupt the flow of the list.) This approach to creating numbered lists is particularly useful and much less prone to the problems associated with Word`s built-in list numbering. For the purposes of this tip, the format of the sequence field is as follows: The fastest way to transfer numbers into your document is to click the Numbering button on the Formatting toolbar. This button displays the default Word numbering scheme in your document (1, 2, 3) or the last numbering scheme used during this Word session. Word`s default numbers are Arabic numerals followed by a period. This greatly facilitates the traceability of requirements. I can simply click on the client requirement and be redirected to the section of the document that describes what needs to be done technically to implement the client`s requirement. Word`s numbering feature is easy to use, but it doesn`t work in all situations. For example, it cannot handle a sequence of numbers online. By inline, I mean a sequence of numbers positioned in plain text. Fortunately, the SEQ field function handles these situations.

I`ll start by showing you how to manually insert the SEQ field code for these unique occurrences. If you use this feature frequently, you should add AutoCorrect elements to quickly insert them into your text. So let`s look at that too. This formatting changes from layer to layer. You need to adjust each numbering level that you want to use. With the above approach to creating requests, I can easily use the bookmarks generated to reference application IDs or application titles, even in documents. Let`s look at the example again. I saved the document from the example above as „Requirements.docx” and created a new „References.docx” document.