This issue may only apply to a select few of you, but if you’ve ever been writing a novel (or legal discovery) and wanted an easy way to auto-update all your chapter numbers after removing or adding chapters, I picked up this trick while I was a litigator and figured I’d share.
How to Make Sequential Chapter Numbers in Word
- Position the cursor at point where you want the sequential number to appear. For instance, after “Chapter”
2. Press Ctrl F9 (command F9 on a Mac) to insert field brackets. Make sure the insertion cursor stays between the
brackets. Where your cursor was, it’ll look like this:
3. Type seq NumList in between the brackets.
4. If it’s not selected/grey in color, click once anywhere in between the brackets and press F9 to update the field information. Word replaces the field with the next number in the sequence you have specified. In this case, it should be 1.
5. Highlight the number 1 (it might be grey now but won’t stay that way once you click anywhere else) and copy/paste it after every chapter title in your manuscript. It’ll be the same number, but that’s okay because the point of this trick is to be able to auto-update them easily.
6. There are 2 main ways to update the numbers. The first way is a bit tedious, but after you copy/paste the number after each chapter heading, you can highlight the number and press F9, in which case it’ll update, or you can right click the number (my aim isn’t that great, so I do the highlighting version) and select “Update Field”.
If you do them individually, you can get this result.
7. The second way is a bit more comprehensive/faster–at least once you have all these sequential numbers copy/pasted into your chapter headings. You just highlight the first number (not the word ‘chapter’ — the actual number) and select all text until the very end of the last copy/paste of these numbers, then right click and select “update field”. All numbers that you’ve made into auto-numbers will automatically update to the proper order, and you no longer have to worry if you have two chapter 32’s in your book when you send it to an agent!
Remember to always do this update before you submit to an agent, as the numbers won’t *automatically* update, but they will all update if you tell them to, without having to do it manually for each one and possibly misnumbering them.
If you want to try out more formatting tricks, I wrote a post about formatting a novel for self-printing.
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