356 Numbering items in a diagram

- [Instructor] I want to number each of these labels in this diagram, and fortunately that's pretty easy to do with automatic paragraph numbering. Now I've already applied a paragraph style to each of these paragraphs. So all I need to do is go over to my paragraph styles panel and right click on the numbered diagram paragraph style. I want to right click on this instead of double click because I don't have any objects selected right now, and if I double click it will make that style my document default, and I don't want that.

So instead I right click and now I choose edit. Now I can come over here and click on the bullets and numbering pane. And I'm going to turn on my list type to numbers. To see what I'm doing I'll turn on the preview checkbox down here in the lower left corner and I'm going to move this dialog box out of the way a little bit just so I can see those numbers. Now I don't want this dot and the big space after the number. So I'll come over here to the number field inside the dialog box and I'll remove this code.

Now it's just a number, but I do want a little bit of space so I'll just press the space character, and that adds a space after the number. Now when I click in any other field you'll see it takes effect. So that looks pretty good except for one little problem. All of these are numbered one. That's not gonna work. The reason they're numbered one is that the frames are not threaded together. They're not a single story. But that's okay. It's easy to get around that even without threading them. All we need to do is come over here to the list popup menu and choose a list.

Now I don't have one right now so I'm going to click new list. And I'll call this diagram1. You'll need a different list name for each set of numbers. Like if I had several different diagrams in my document I'd want a different list for each one. Now when I click OK you see the numbers updated. Here, I'm going to move this over and click on the OK button so I can see what I've done. Now that looks great except for one thing. The numbers aren't in the order that I want.

I want these in alphabetical order. Now if I didn't care about the order I'd be done now. But I do want to change the order. Like, I want arm to be number one. So here's the trick, these items are numbered in the order that the text frames were created on the page. I know that's kind of weird, but it's just the way InDesign works. So in order to reorder them I need to recreate them. But it's not has hard as it sounds. All I need to do is cut and paste them in the order I want them in.

Like I'm gonna choose arm down here first, and I'm going to cut it to the clipboard with a command x or a control x on Windows. Now I'll go to the edit menu and instead of choosing paste I'm gonna choose paste in place because that puts it back in the same place as it was, right? Now on the Mac that's command option shift v, or on Windows it's control alt shift v. It doesn't look like anything changed, but I now know that that object is the first item in the stack.

Lie I want belly to be number two, so I'll cut it to the clipboard, and then I'll use that same keyboard shortcut to paste it in place. Next, I want eye, and then the last one here. You can see that with the keyboard shortcuts it goes pretty quickly. So there we go. They're numbered in the order that I wanted them in. So that's the trick to numbering a bunch of text frames like this. It takes a little bit of time but it's not that hard.