In real life, amid many situations, you need to indicate items of importance. Several possibilitires exist - are these items of importance ordered or not ordered. Another factor, how do we get the attention to these items of those who need to know this.
The second part can be answered first: intense darkness surrounded by white has a natural pull for human eyesight. Why this is the case as far as evolution is the case, others will have to answer, but this is a known fact as far as human eyesight is concerned.
This leads us also to the answer of the first part. Use high intensity darkness to precede the items that need to be drawn to attention. And so, that leads us to bullets and numbering
The intention is to direct the eyes to the these items. The bullet (which probably began as used ammunition that was inked and set to paper) is a special symbol put at the front of a set of items. Most people who deal with this would call these items: "action" items.
All the versions of Word deal with this well with one limitation. Bullets (and numbering as discussed later) are applied only to paragraphs. These are paragraph commands.
In diealig with these action items, first thing to do to highlight them all. To start, in the paragraph section, top most control, is the bullet command. A click on the control itself will create bullets on all the paragiraphs indicated. Notice how this works. The paragraph is indented a default amount. part of this indent is made up of the bullet. Notice that the high intensity of the bullet - surrounded by the white space of the indent - attracts the eye. Below is such an example
Word starts with a default selection of bullet icons that will be displayed to you if you click the list part of the control to the right. Below you can see the list that I have on my machine at home. Clicking on any one of these would bullet the assigned paragraphs, but with the chosen symbol.
We can gain more control in two ways: first by the ruler. Highlight the already bulleted items and look at the ruler. The left controls on the ruler allow for bullet margin manipulation. The control on top left moves the bullet. the tab event (l) moves the first line and then the other lines of the paragraph are moved by the bottom left control. The result of such a manipulation is shown below. Grabbing the left controls of the ruler will provide a variety of results as far as the bullets are concerned
In addition, you can click on define new bullet. Here you have a choice in terms of your selection. You can use a variation of font designated as wingding or symbol to find more possible bullet icons. This is easy enough to do keeping in mind the the wingding and symbol fonts have been created just for this and not for traditional prose. In addition, you can select a picture and use a miniature of this picture for the bullet. Microsoft provides a number of pictures which act somewhat like a bulleted type of clip art. But you are free to use your own. Below you can see the 007 symbol used accordingly.
Now on to numbering. The difference between numbered items and bulleted items logically is the question of sequence, which should be done first. After that, one is substituting the bullet with some sequence3d item. Among those supported are numbers - 1,2,3,4 etc. letters - A,B,C,D or a,b,c,d, etc. Roman numerals - capped and lower i,ii,iii,vi,etc or ordinal- 1st,2nd,3rd, 4th or fist, second, third, fourth. There are additional possibilities not existing with bullets. What separator character should be used. there is a difference between 1,2,3,4 and 1/,2/,3/,4/ and 1.,2.,3.,4. The difference is the separator. Below, we can see an example of changing the use of bullets to ordinal although the underlying concept makes no sence as there is no real order sequence to these items - it is only used for demo purposes
And finally, what letter, number or ordinal do we start with. Sometimes there is a need to list 5,6,7 as opposed to 1,2,3. Not surpringly, this is found in define new number. Below is an example of setting five to fourteen. We use the option - continue from previous list, advance. We can also change by creating a new list (this splits the previous list). Move your cursor to the numbered item above where the change will occur and then select define new number, start new list. Below is an example of this
