Tip of the Week: Alternative Uses for Numbered Lists

This InDesign tip on alternative uses for numbered lists was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on November 3, 2016.

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There’s no need to limit InDesign’s Numbered List feature to inserting numbers before text paragraphs. For example, perhaps you would like to have the word “TIP” followed by a colon in front of certain paragraphs. The easy way to do this is to define a numbered list by choosing a paragraph style and, in the Paragraph Styles panel, clicking on the flyout menu and mousing down to Paragraph Style Options. In the resulting Paragraph Style Options window, select the Bullets and Numbering option in the left-hand pane.

In the right-hand pane, set the List type as Numbers and leave the Format option set as None. But then, in the field for Number, enter the word TIP followed by the code for a tab (^t). You can even apply a character style to this non-numbered list.

There are two big benefits to this process:
1. You don’t have to type the word TIP and insert a tab character.
2. If your client decides to change the word “TIP” to “NOTE”, you simply change the style definition, and the word will change everywhere that style is applied.

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