You also have a number (sorry!) of options to choose from in order to customise your line numbering. This menu also allows to you to choose whether to restart the numbering at the beginning of each page, or each section, or to suppress the numbering for the particular paragraph your cursor is in. Line numbers have automatically appeared, but the formatting of the text, its justification etc., remain as they were. It will automatically be set to None – choose Continuous and see what happens to your paragraphs … There you will find Line Numbers:Ĭlick on the arrow next to Line Numbers to bring up its Options menu: Line numbering and its options can be found in Word 2007 and Word 2010 in the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup area. How to add line numbers to a Word document – the correct way (Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013)

The numbers push the lines across and they run over onto the next line all possibility of right justification is lost and heaven help you if you want to insert or delete any text once you’ve done it! Then you would highlight the whole text and add numbered bullets. Well, to do this you would have to put a return at the end of each line to make it into a new line. If you find the need to add line numbers, it’s kind of natural that you might think – oh, I’ll just make the whole document into a numbered list. How NOT to add line numbers to a Word document So these are all reasons for adding line numbers to a Word document. Transcriptions will sometimes have line numbers, if they’re going to be discussed in detail, and we can probably all recall from our dim and distant pasts working on critiques of poems and plays which had 5, 10, 15 etc. Presumably they wanted to be able to refer to particular line numbers in their criticism of the piece. I was inspired to write this post after my colleague Katharine O’Moore Klopf mentioned that she’d been asked to do this by the editors of a journal for which she was editing an article. Why do I need to add line numbers to a Word document? Why would you want to do that? Read on and find out! This works for Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013.

This article explains the correct – and incorrect – way to add line numbers to a Word document.

Add line numbering in word 2016 for mac