Do you manually insert a number to every figure (i.e., picture) in your Word document? If yes, then it’s time to ditch that “bad” habit and use automation! Word has a nifty feature that helps you automate the figure numbering in your document. This will save you a lot of time from manually updating each figure if more figures get added later on. Here’s how:
1. Place your cursor below the figure.
2. Then, on the References tab, in the Captions group, click Insert Caption.
3. The Caption dialog box appears. By default, Figure 1 is shown.
4. Give a short description of the figure next to Figure 1. Leave all the other fields as they are. Click OK.
5. The numbering and caption are inserted below the figure but it is left-align. Make it center-align instead.
So this is your first figure. Repeat the same steps for other figures. In this example, let’s insert up till three figures. You will notice the figure number in the Caption dialog box starts at 2:
It will automatically increase as you add more figures into the document.
6. This is how it looks like with three figures and its captions:
Unfortunately, when you delete a figure, Word does not automatically update the numbering. But no worries, there is a workaround to this. To update the numbering after you have deleted a picture, select the entire document by pressing Ctrl + A buttons and right-click any of the figure numbering (or caption). Click Update Field.
And there you have it, the figure numbering is updated accordingly.
Now, imagine if you have over 100 figures in your user guide, and you have deleted one or more figures across different pages, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to update the numbering as described above rather than manually update it one by one? ;) In my next post, I will show you how you can do the same for a table numbering.
