Cross Reference Outlines

[amcguire]

Okay, I am feeling very dense

I have reviewed probably a dozen or so articles on this subject but I am unable to get any of the suggestions to work for me. I have tried Outlines, Numbered lists, Paragraph numbering and assorted style methods in OOo 2.0 to no avail (though I am very good at referencing figures).

Here is the task:
I have an numbered list that has items that reference the numbers in the list. If a new item is inserted, the numbers need to change appropriately. Here is an example:

1. This is the first item
2. This is the second item that needs to reference item 1.
3. This is a third item that also needs to reference 1.
4. This is a fourth item but this one needs to reference 3.

I can get the list item to reference itself automatically but not able to reference any other list item. I can also manually set up each item as a reference but that takes a ton of time when there are several hundred items in the list.

What I would like to be able to do is to start a numbered list and be able to go to the "Fields" tool and pick from an automatically generated list of numbers (of the numbers on the numbered list) that I can pick to reference.

Please give me step-by-step instructions on how to do this in OOo 2.0 I am feeling very dense because I have read many other wonderful looking posts on this subject and others but none of them seem to work for me and I am hoping it is not just my problem.

Thanks.

[jeanweber]

[ftack]

Indeed, OOo is not able to automatically cross referrence numbers in a numbered list. See http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=25072

[amcguire]

Thank you, thank you for restoring my confidence

It seems to be quite a popular problem. I saw Issue 25072 in my search on this topic over a year ago and I assumed "OOoLater" would mean OOo 2.0.x So I was hoping that issue would have been developed and implemented in some way already.

This is critical for any legal group to justify using OOo since all their documents tend to reference paragraph numbers, outlines, or numbered items of some sort.

WordPerfect does an ok job of this (I think that is why I have seen may law firms using it over Word) but you still have to make a reference name for each number and these names are not dynamic as the structure changes.

I think that implementation of a quick reference feature for outlines and paragraph numbers that auto-builds and updates the list based on the current list and a tool bar pulldown to select the number you want to reference would be very beneficial to OOo. I would sure lobby my firm to support OOo and our partners to consider OOo too.

Ok, so besides "Votes" how can I help encourage getting this feature implemented? In the mean time, back to WordPerfect