Getting rid of heading or outline numbering everywhere

As I’m adding some text and assigning it as one of the heading styles it indents the heading as if the heading is in a list. I go to the heading style in order to edit it and I can see under “Outline and List” tab two things:

  1. Under the “Outline” heading “Outline Level” is set to “Level 3” (in this particular case)
  2. Under the “Apply List Style” heading “List style” is set to “Heading Numbering”

All controls are greyed out, and I didn’t set any of this.

If I try to hit the Edit Style button, i get a tooltip that says, confusingly: “This option is disabled when heading numbering is assigned to a paragraph style”

Given that the dialogue box I am in is entitled “Paragraph Style: Heading 3” - I’d say that the above message is pretty confusing.

How do I just get rid of all lists and numbering associated with headings, because I don’t want any of it.

Thanks

Click Tools > Heading Numbering > Numbering and set Number to None and then under Separator delete any spaces or other characters in Before and After. OK

I wish the AI bot followed the community guidelines - the above “answer” violates “Does your reply improve the conversation” - it doesn’t answer the question, just provides an invalid workaround (all are already set to NONE, and nothing in separator section, and am I really expected to go to every heading instance and do this, anyway?)

Did you try it before replying? I refer to the menu items Tools - Heading numbering not to paragraph styles nor to individual headings

i know what you are referring to, in fact, I tried it (where it wasn’t just invalid, which was almost everywhere) before even asking the original question (which you didn’t read).

There is only one place, not everywhere

As soon as I click OK in the above screenshot the word “Chapter”, the spaces and the numbering will be removed from all headings in the document

except they are not (on my Apple Silicon version of 24.8.2.1 LibreOffice), when I go back to those heading styles they still show “Outline Level” is set to “Level 3” etc, and behave accordingly. The only way around it is to go to the individual heading instance and go to paragraph styles there and switch this “feature” off.

and I can’t even delete the Heading styles that are in the document, and set them up how I want - I seem to have to take the defaults, or set up a whole parallel structure: super annoying.

It might be possible that the document was created in a version that had an issue with indenting the headings.
Can you create a short anonymised sample, copy maybe a couple of headings and some text into a new document and replace all the words with x or something?

good point, I did upgrade Office Libre between when I started the document and trying to deal with the problem this morning. So, I’ll build a whole new document, and I’ll go to Tools > Heading Numbering > Numbering and switch everything off before doing anything else.

Sometimes just copying the entire document to a new document removes some oddities.
Heading Numbering is switched off by default.

well, the “numbering” might be (which is the heading or title of the feature), but I swear I never set up any indentations, they introduced themselves.

If the document was started in 7.4 then bug tdf#151974 might have applied but it was fixed for 7.6.

This question is the one I couldn’t find earlier today but might relate to your issue, Why do my headings get automatically indented in Writer?. The solution then was to paste the entire document into a brand new blank document.

A comment first:

Because it is a list. This list is a special, protected, internal one. To avoid damage, the controls in Outline & List of Heading n are disabled (grayed out).

Control on heading numbering is provided by a mechanism distinct from standard list control because the heading list has additional features compared to ordinary lists, in particular automatic association of paragraph style to list level.

Consequently, you must go to Tools>Heading Numbering. To suppress all numbering, select Level 1-10 and choose Numbering None.

If you want more selective numbering, do the operation on each specific level.

Have any occasional direct formatting? In sophisticated documents, it is highly preferable to exclusively use styles.

In a list (reminder: numbered headings are a list), the list style takes control of indents. Don’t try to adjust indents Before Text and First Line in the paragraph style because this creates conflict and messes up (damages?) your document. Consequently, even with None numbering, tune your indents in Tools>Heading Numbering.

Yes and this is perfectly expected: Heading n are still member of a list (without number) and this is necessary to build a consistent TOC. The only way to turn Heading n into ordinary non-list paragraph style is to detach them from the internal chapter numbering list style. You do this in Tools>Heading Numbering by selecting Paragraph Style [None] at each level.