MS Word 2013 Captions, Headings and Styles with outline numbers

Question

I have a somewhat large word document with several chapter headings, section headings and sub section headings. It also contains an appendix section.

So I've used "Heading 1" for chapter headings, "Heading 2" for section headings and "Heading 3" for sub section headings. Chapter headings should be shown like "Chapter 01-Analysis" etc. They have been applied to chapter headings for an outline number list using the Multilevel List feature. (So the text "Chapter" and "the number" will be populated automatically).

NOTE: This custom outline style was connected to built in Heading 1

Appendices start from "Appendix A" through to "Appendix H". Appendix heading should be like "Appendix A- Design Documentation". Since it's a different series (A,B,C...), I could't use the same Heading 1 and so I've created a Style (Level 1 style) based on Heading 1 and then another outline number series created and connected it to the style and used it for appendix headings. So the text "Appendix" and "the letter" will be created automatically).

Everything was fine until I started giving captions to figures and tables. Caption should include chapter number or appendix number and series number. For Example first figure in "Chapter 3" would look like "Figure 3.1." etc. In chapters all figures and tables were named without a problem. But when it came to Appendices the problem was that the last chapter number was taken for the captions instead for the appendix letters. I can't find out the problem here as the Style 1 applied for appendix headers ** also based on Heading 1 and it's Level 1.**.

How could I sort out this problem?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, numbering for captions is based on heading styles (unlike multilevel lists, which can be based on any style). However, I did find a workaround. In the Caption dialog box, select the New Label... button and create the label Figure A-. Use that label for all figures in Appendix A, and they'll show up numbered correctly as A-1, A-2, A-3.

The primary downside of this answer is that because you're manually creating a label for each appendix, it can easily get messed up if appendices are added or deleted. Also, if you have a large number of appendices, creating figure labels for each of them might also take more time than it's worth.