The Hermit Hermit's Free Library  Brain Teasers

How to move items around in a list without using cut and paste.

Hermit's Brain Teaser #1: Moving Items Up and Down in a List

Solution

Sorting won't work, and neither is cut and paste a good solution because it is so labor intensive.

Outside of telepathic computing, MS-Word's Move Up and Move Down commands would be the best ticket here.

Use the Shift-Alt-[Up/Down Arrow] combinations to move paragraphs up or down in an MS-Word document.

(Each item in a list is a paragraph).

No need to select text, just have the insertion point anywhere in the paragraph (list item).

Move Up and Move Down are actually Outline view tools, but they work also work great in Draft (Normal) and Print Layout views.

In addition to moving whole paragraphs, the commands can be used to move sentences (even word groups) within a paragraph or between paragraphs by temporarily isolating material into their own paragraph with the Enter key.