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Laurence Ormerod recently wrote to me with a heartfelt plea: "Simon, I recently upgraded (if that's the word, I'm beginning to wonder) to Office 2007. To be fair, most of it is an improvement. However, one thing is driving me nuts: namely, how to have a custom list style.

"I'd like all my documents to have numbered lists that have the number with no indent, then a 1cm tab space, and then a 1cm hanging indent. For Multilevel lists (previously called Outline lists I think), I'd like the next level to be indented by 1cm, then a further tab (making 2cm) and the hanging indent at 2cm, and so on. For bullet lists, just a plain bullet with no indent and a 1cm tab space and 1cm hanging indent.

"Seems simple, but is anything but. I can get what I want by manually dragging on the ruler each time I do a list. For an Outline list, I can set it up each time. It seems Microsoft has decided that we all should get lists where the number is indented in and the hanging indent 1in, and also that Style has a Numbering Style, but even when I've set my indents, the Numbering Style remains, saying '0.63cm'.

"That's one problem. Another is that it's very unclear what happens when you want to create a new Style. If you make a Style for the Gallery and give it a name, you can still switch off the numbering, but switch it on again and it appears to be whatever the Number Library is holding, and not what you had in the Style. So, my question is, is

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there any way at all to have Word do lists that aren't in indented (do they mean the whole world to use that format?) and save this as part of a template, Gallery, List Library or wherever? I see plenty of articles saying lists 'can be a headache'. Maybe you could do an article about this; I'm sure I'm not alone in being driven nuts!"

I agree completely. You'd think it would be easy to set up numbered lists in Word, until you try. One problem is that bullets and numbering are intimately connected with styles and outlining, and you need to know about all of these topics if you're not to tie yourself in knots.

Simple bullets and numbered lists are relatively straightforward: you click the bullet or numbering button on the Ribbon and then just type, pressing Enter to start a new item and pressing Enter twice when you want to finish the list. If you already have some text you want to convert, select it and then click the bullet or numbering button. If you want to choose a fancier bullet or a different style of numbering, you use the dropdown arrows on the relevant buttons to pick from the list of bullet or numbering types. You can have round, square or diamond bullets, and numbering can be Arabic (1, 2, 3...), Roman (i, ii, iii...) or letters (a, b, c...). You can have upper- or lower-case letters or Roman numerals, and the numbering can be followed by a full-stop or a bracket.

If you don't like any of the bullets in the Bullet Library, you can use the Define New Bullet... option at the bottom to make a new one. You can choose any symbol from any font (Wingdings and Webdings are particularly rich sources) and use Font formatting to set the size, colour and effects for your new bullet. Alternatively, you can pick a picture bullet from the Clip Art collections, including those on Office Online. If you don't see exactly what you want, you can import your own images as picture bullets. For normal text, your image should be between 12 and 20 pixels square and it will be scaled to match the font size of the paragraph.