Office 2007 Multilevel Lists vs List Styles

Introduction
A common question that comes up is about the difference between multilevel lists and list styles. Stuart discussed these two list types in his post The Many Levels of Lists. What I hope to do in this blog post is an in-depth look at the similarities and differences between these two concepts. Quick Overview
An easy way to look at this would be to think of list styles as an improved version of multilevel lists,Cheap Office 2010, since both are ways to define all nine levels of a list in one go. So, why do we need both?
Well, a multilevel list is a feature that can be found in Word documents dating back to very early versions of Office. In order for these documents to render correctly in newer version of Office, this feature is maintained and made to work alongside new Word features. The disadvantage, as Stuart mentioned, is that multilevel lists could not be named, modified or easily exported to other documents and templates.
List styles were introduced in Office 2007 to give lists the same advantages as other styles (paragraph and characters styles), which included: Ability to modify the existing definition Ability to share the your perfectly crafted style with other documents
By allowing the list style to be named,Office Professional Plus 2010, Word is now able to better keep the definition of the list separate from the actual instance of the list. That way a single list style can be referenced by multiple lists and each list can have its own individual tweaks if necessary. More Details Defining a New List
Let's start by going through the dialog used to create and modify these two list types. As a quick review, you can create a new multilevel style or a list style by going to the third numbering button on the Home tab.

Other than the differences mentioned above, the features available for both types of lists are identical (as illustrated by the diagrams below). When creating a new multilevel list, you are thrown directly into a dialog that shows all of your available options for customizing the list. This dialog can be a bit daunting,Buy Office Professional 2007, so for list styles in Office 2007, we followed the example set by the other styles and simplified the dialog you are first shown. And also like the other styles, we list all of your customization options under the "Format" button. Once you select "Numbering…" under this button, you are presented with all of the same, advanced options as multilevel lists.
Multilevel List
List Style

Sharing Lists with Other Documents
Another strong point of list styles is the ability to share them across documents. This way, once you've spent the time customizing the lists in your document, you can re-use the style in other documents you create. The easiest way to share the "formatting" of a multilevel list is to copy a list from one document to anther and then modified the items of the list to suit the needs of the new document. With list styles, you can transfer them quickly to a new document the same way as other styles: through the Styles Organizer. This way only the formatting you want is transferred not the unnecessary content.
Multilevel List
List Style

Saving to DOCX
I'm not going to go through the full details of how bullets and numbers are represented in OOXML (although, if you are interested, you can find the ISO standard here: )
Simply put, the xml parts,Buy Office 2007, within the document package, which are most important to multilevel lists and list styles, are document.xml and numbering.xml. Numbering.xml stores the actual definition of the list, while the document.xml part contains the main document text and references the numbering.xml part for the information on how the list should be formatted. The underlying structures of a multilevel list vs. a list style are quite similar. The way the document.xml part stores the list text and references the list definitions is identical. The numbering.xml part is also quite similar with the main difference in the being the additional of an element in the list style which stores the name of the style.
Multilevel List
List Style


You can also tell, from the sample above ,Windows Product Key, that list styles grew out of multilevel lists by the fact that the <w:multiLevelType> element for both constructs are the same. Conclusion
Hopefully, this blog post gave you a better understanding of these two list types and why they both exist in Word today. If you have any other questions about the similarities/differences, please let me know and I'll try to pull together another blog post with the answers.
- Amani
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