Conveniently adding heading number AND text for a cross reference

Question

I mostly write technical documentation. The documents need a lot of cross references. The format of my cross references are always the same:

<heading-number> <space> <heading-text>.

Adding these using the cross reference dialog is a pain. Find the heading, select paragraph-number from the drop down, insert, select paragraph-text from the drop down, insert, go back to the doc, insert the space (and, normally, change the inserted heading-text to Italic).

Is there any more convenient way of doing this? I did look at existing questions about cross-references (and there's a bunch of those) but none seemed to cover this issue.

Answer 1

I have written a macro to comfortably insert cross references, avoiding all the hassle of the cross reference dialog that you have described.
It can insert either <heading-number> or <heading-text>, but would be easily adaptable to insert the desired combination of both.

Answer 2

7 years ago and still people fighting with that. Here is my small contribution: Dim strCode As String

With Dialogs(wdDialogInsertCrossReference)
    .ReferenceType = "Numbered item"
    .ReferenceKind = wdNumberRelativeContext
    .InsertAsHyperlink = True
    .SeparateNumbers = False
    .Show
End With
Selection.TypeBackspace 'trick it selects the complete field
Selection.Copy
Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1 ' unselect
Selection.TypeText Text:=" " ' Separate with one space
Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault) ' duplicate the copied field
Selection.TypeBackspace ' Select the duplicated field
strCode = Selection.Fields(1).Code ' get the code from the field
strCode = Replace(strCode, "\r ", "") ' Remove option to have paragraph text
strCode = Replace(strCode, "\w ", "")
Selection.Fields(1).Code.Text = strCode ' Update the text of the ;code text
Selection.Fields.Update ' Update the field to display § text
Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1 ' Deselect the updated field
Selection.TypeText Text:=" " ' add a space at the end

End Sub

Provided as is, it works for me ;-) Have fun and spare time to fun...