Creating Report-Style Numbered Headings In Mac Pages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at using numbered headings in Pages.

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So recently I've seen a lot of people requesting the ability to have numbered headings in Pages. This is where you have a heading for a section, say Section 1, and then maybe a subsection 1.1 and then the next section is section 2 and they all have numbers in the headings and they'll automatically adjust. If you add a new section between 2 and 3 then it pushes all the sections after it up by a number. So 4, 5, 6, etc. So to accomplish this what we're going to do is use numbered bullet lists but we're only going to use them in the headings. Then use a few other settings to get it working even though the text in-between the headings is not part of the list. First I'm going to show you starting with a blank document and then we'll go and look at an existing document and how to convert it to this system.

So here I am in a blank Pages document. Let's start off with a heading. I'm just going to use the word heading for all the headings here. Obviously each one would have a different name in your document. Now the first thing I want to do is I want to create a special style for this. I'm going to make it Bold and increase the size a bit. I'm going to go in and add a new style. I'm going to call this Numbered Heading. Now whenever I want to use this style I can easily access it. 

Now I want to add the number. I'm going to do that using Bullets & Lists down here below. Click this to reveal the Bullets & Lists settings and I'm not going to use one of the preset styles. Instead I'm going to create my own. So I'm going to go to this menu here and use Numbers. Then I'm going to scroll down more because there are more options now. I'm going to make sure I've selected the standard numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and I'm going to choose Tiered Numbers and I'll leave Continue from Previous on.

Now I want to create a style for this. Bullets & Lists styles are separate from the regular styles here. So you can see I can click here and I can hit the Plus button and I'll just call this Heading. This is my own style. This is a very important step because if you try using one of the existing styles or you don't use styles at all it's going to make things very difficult. I'm going to hit Return and I'm going to add another heading and add a few more.

Now if I want to add a subsection here I can hit Return after this and it'll insert a new one. Then I'll hit the Tab key to indent in or use this button here. When I do notice the number goes away at this level. At the second level there's no number. Let's type heading there. I'm going to go back here to the Bullets & Lists settings. I'm going to change this to Numbers and make sure I've got Tiered Numbers turned on and Continue from Previous. I can see now it says 1.1 which is great. But notice here where it says Heading*. We changed something about the heading style so I want to Update it. So I'll click the Update button here. 

Now let's create another subsection one level deeper. I'll hit Return there and it goes to 1.2. I'll Tab in and it goes to the next level. Let's do the same thing there. So I'll change it to Numbers, I'll check everything here and then I'll Update Heading. Now I can use these freely. So I can go to a new level here. I'll Shift Tab or use this left button to go back up like that. I can add sub headings here under 3. Tab in. Add another section in here. Tab back out. You can see how I can do it.

Now let's further modify this. Instead of having all these indents let's have everything flush to the left. After all we're going to have text in-between these that's going to be flush left so it makes sense to have the headings there as well. So when I click here one of the ones that's indented by one level and I'm going to look here under Indent. I've got a .5" indent. So I'm going to switch that to zero. Then I'm going to go in here, Update again, and you see everything at that level moves over to zero. I'll click one of these, which is two levels in, and I'll also change that from a 1" indent to zero and Update. So now everything is there flush with the left.

I can also work with the space after the number. You can see here there's a nice space but here there's not. If I look here at this level I could see here that the title starts at .25". If I click here you could see it also starts at .25" but the 1.1. is more than that so it makes more sense to have something like .4. Now I need to do the Update again. Let's go to this level here and I'll change this to .6 and I'll Update again. So now I've got nice spacing in-between these. It doesn't work that great once you have more digits. Once I go and have 10.11.12 then it's really going to push things out. So this isn't ideal but it's the best we can do. 

Now these are great headings but I want to actually have text in here. So I'm going to put the cursor right after this heading and I'm going to hit Return and it's going to add a new section. I don't want a new section. So I'm going to go here to Bullets & Lists and set List Style to None. Now you can see that I've got regular text there. Let me insert something. I'll paste some text in. Let's change that Style to Body Text. So there we go. I can do the same things with this section here. Instead of changing to Bullets & Lists to None I can also just as soon as I hit Return, hit Delete. Then it automatically sets the type of List to None. So I'll paste some text in. I'll set it's Style to Body. 

All this setting of Styles here you can make that easier if you click in here. You can see for Numbered Heading, if I click here I can set a Shortcut. One of the F keys. The same thing for Body. I can set a Shortcut for that. I can also do the same thing here for Bullets & Lists. Under here you can see I can set a Shortcut for that and just have a real easy way to set these.

Now notice even though I've inserted text in-between these the numbering still picks up. You've still got 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 and all of that. That's because you see if I select in here I have Continue from Previous set to On. So if for some reason one of these doesn't pick up the numbering from the previous heading then just go and check to make sure Continue from Previous is set On for that line. If it's turned off for any of these it will simply break this and start over again at one.

Now I can also do various things to make it look nicer. For instance instead of having Numbered Heading style for everything I could have Numbered Heading 1, Numbered Heading 2, and Numbered Heading 3 and make it say a little smaller for each one of these. I could also change the indenting a little bit. Maybe not go back to the extreme that it originally was but say if I want the first level here to be indented slightly, so maybe .2 so it's indented a little bit, then I can Update and you could see all those are in a little bit. Then the third level there I could have that go in .5 and then Update and they will all update. So you could still do that. Then you could do the same thing here for the Body Text. So Body could be indented zero to match this but then Body 2 you could create that and say have it under Layout, Indents and have the Left match here. Both the first line and the rest. So you could see how it's underneath like that. Then I could go back here and  create a new Body 2 that I can then use again every time. 

You're going to have to really pay attention to everything  you type to Setting of Styles. But once it's all setup it's not that hard to do and you can make changes that then go through the entire document. Plus by using this I could insert a new section anywhere I want and the numbering will be pushed down. So here I have, between 2 and 3, I can hit Return, insert a new section 3, and you can see the old section 3 is now 4 and everything else is pushed down and renumbered.

But what if you already have a document and you have these headings in there and you want to implement this afterwards. You can use the same tools but implementing it is going to be a little different. So let's go to this first heading here. I've already created a Numbered Heading style and all of these are using that. So now it's just a matter of getting the numbered bullets in there. So I'll put my cursor in the first one. I'll Go to Bullets & Lists. I'll choose Continue from Previous. Now I'll go and create a Style for that. So I'll click here and I'll hit the Plus button and then I'll call this Heading. Now that one is set.

So now I can go down to here and you'd think I'd be able to click here and then choose Heading and it would work. But in fact it thinks it's the beginning of a new list. So even though I've applied the Style I still have to go and use Continue from Previous. Now you can see it picks up. I can do the same thing here. So I'll do Heading and then Continue from Previous and it picks up there.

But now what if this is a 1.1 and not 2. So I'll go in here and click this button or hit Tab and you can see it doesn't know that it should be numbered. So I have to go in again and say Numbers, make sure Tiered is checked, make sure Continue from Previous is On. Now that that's set I need to Update the Style. I only need to do that the first time I do a second level here. So let's go and do a third level here. I'll do Tab in and you can see it thinks it's 1.2. So far so good. Tab it again and it doesn't have the numbering there at that level. So I'll go and choose Numbers and then I will Update.

Now I can also have this go flush left. So let's go back to here at this level and I will change the Indent to zero. Since I'm here I'll change the text indent to .4 so I moves it a little bit away from that. Then I will Update and that takes care of it for that level. Then here I'll go and I'll Update stuff there as well. I'll set this to zero. I'll set this to .6 and now I need to Update here as well. So now for this one I need to go and assign Headings. So I'll set it here and then I need to check Continue from Previous which is always going to be a pain. You're always going to have to do that manually. Now if I Tab in you can see it correctly goes to 1.2. Tab it again you can see it correctly goes to 1.1.2. If you need another level you just need to repeat the steps from before. I can Shift Tab to go back like that.

It sounds like a lot of work for every heading. But you can use Copy and Paste to kind of do it quickly. So here I don't have the heading set for the next one. Instead I'm going to select this line. Copy. Then go down here and Paste. The cool thing is when you Copy and Paste it not only remembers the Style, so you can see here it is Style setting, but it remembers the Continue from Previous. So I can continue now to paste new headings. Then just change the text. Even if I select in there and go and Tab in, it will do the numbering correctly.

So that's how you do it. It's not perfect. You're not using the numbered Bullet & Lists for what they were intended for. You're kind of taking that functionality and combining it with Headings and using the Continued from Previous to kind of get this functionality. So it's not perfect. It's a little frustrating to work with. You kind of have to get the hang of it. Then even once you get the hang of it, it's kind of frustrating to change things here and there. But for long documents it's definitely better than typing the number manually and then having to deal with changing all the numbers if you insert a section.