Leading the way in Microsoft Office Development

You may find some really annoying behaviour when you use the following buttons on the Formatting toolbar.

 Bullets - Adds bullets to or removes bullets from selected paragraphs.

 Numbering - Adds numbers to or removes numbers from selected paragraphs.

Press (File > New) and create a new blank document.

Display the Paragraph Marks so you can see all the formatting.

All these examples use the standard Normal.dot template and the default bullets and numbers.

They all start with the following text at the top of the page.

Highlight the second and third lines and press the Bullets button.

1) Unable to Indent the First Line

Position the cursor at the beginning of the second line and press the Increase Indent button.

The third line also gets indented. In fact all the bullet points in the block will have their indentation increased.

That is a bit annoying but it gets worse. In fact completely different blocks also get indented.

2) Inconsistent when Decreasing the Indentation of a line

Press the Decrese Indent button.

Both the lines have their indentation changed and worse than that they have all their indentation removed.

The bullets were actually on level 2. They should have been reduced to level 1.

It seems that if the lines of text have been indented to level 2, 4, 6 or 8 then pressing the Decrease Indent button will actually decrease the indentation by 2 levels instead of one.

2) Bullet points only change when there are different levels

Change all the lines of text back to the Normal style.

Highlight the second and third lines and press the Bullets button on the Formatting toolbar

Position the cursor at the beginning of the third line

Press the Increase Indent button on the Formatting toolbar

The bullet change changes to something different ?

2) Different blocks get indented

Remove all the bullet points by pressing (Ctrl + "A") and selecting the Normal style.

Move to the end of the third line and press Enter.

Place the insertion point in the second line and add bullets by pressing the Bullets button.

Place the insertion point in the third line and add bullets by pressing the Bullets button.

Place the cursor at the start of the second line and press the Increase Indent button.

The fourth line also gets indented even though it is in a completely different block.