Disable multilevel list in Word 2013?

I'm not surprised that removing the list from the library doesn't Undo it from the document, but, while the "Remove from List Library" command does not appear for the "Current list," it does appear for the same list in the Library below. It would seem to me that the way to change the numbering would be to apply a different list linked to the same styles.

To remove numbering altogether, although it would be possible to define a multilevel list with no numbering, each level linked to a heading style, another approach would be to select None for a given heading, then update the style. That is, click in a Heading 1, click the Multilevel List dropdown, choose None, then right-click the Heading 1 style in the Quick Styles gallery or Styles pane and choose Update Heading 1 to Match Selection.

In my opinion, Microsoft has really messed up the application of something that used to work really well (going from Word 2003 to Word 2007 and beyond).

Essentially, unless you're willing to muck around with the XML, Microsoft has provided no way to remove multilevel lists introduced into a document.

So what you want to do is:

1. Select a heading (one that still has one of your lists numbers).

2. Right click on the number and choose Adjust List Indents (or, making sure that step 1 has been done, click on the Multilevel list tool, and choose--very counter-intuitively--Define New Multilevel list)

3. This will open the Multilevel list dialog. Click on More at the bottom left.

4. Repeat this for each heading level

  a) click on the heading level (1 through 9, or however many you have used) at the top left

  b) Set Link level to Style (near the top right) to "(no style)"

5. Click OK.

Now you can still use your heading styles, and the numbers will not be added. But beware, that multilevel numbering list is still lurking in the unseen regions of your document, because, as I have said, the way Microsoft changed this in Word 2007 (and since) means they have given us no easy way of deleting these lists.