If you want to change the way the bullet looks, or if you want multi-level indented bullets, read on. Someone told you using styles was hard? Huh? Ctrl-Shift-L is hard? Sorry, I didn't quite catch what you said. The box tells you that you applied the List Bullet style to the paragraph. You will see that the Style box now says 'List Bullet'. If you have not already used the List Bullet style in this document, hold down Shift and click the arrow next to the Style box. If you have already used the List Bullet style in your document, click the arrow in the Style box and choose List Bullet. Hover over it and it will say 'Style' (Figure 1 and Figure 2). Did you know you had a built-in shortcut to add bullets? No? If you're a mouse personįigure 2: You can reinstate the Styles combo box on the Quick Access Toolbar in Word 2007 and Word 2010 To add a bullet to the text, do ctrl-Shift-L (that's ctrl-Shift-lowercase L, which stands for List Bullet). Quick, fast, safe, reliable, effective, low-fat, low-carbohydrate, low-carbon emission way to bullet a paragraph If you're a keyboard person And, it makes it very easy to apply and control bullets, and to change bulleted paragraphs from one level of indent to the next. The huge advantage of setting up your bullets in the way described here is that it puts you in charge, not Word! It is stable and reliable. If you want to change the look of the bullets or use multiple-levels of bullets, it will take about 3 minutes to get control of bullets. It will take you about 10 seconds to get one level of bullets working well.

The key is to use Word's built-in List Bullet Styles. This page describes how to control bullets in Word. You constantly seem to be re-setting the indents, or re-applying the bullets, or the bullets change size. Managing bullets in anything but the simplest of Microsoft Word documents can easily drive you crazy. The styles will manage the bullets and the indents. Modify the bullets and indenting by modifying the numbering settings of the List Bullet styles.Modify the List Bullet styles so you can have the font, paragraph and other formatting to suit your needs.Apply List Bullet styles to paragraphs you want bulleted.

It looks inviting, but it's not not what you need. Don't use Format > Bullets and Numbering.Quick reference to controlling bullets in Word

List of word formatting marks