bold the first word of something in a bulleted or numbered list

I am in Ms Word for Mac, hope that works for Mac as well?

Read the OP correctly, posted, read the OP again and your answer in one sweep and took away that the problem was unwanted bolding. Acted too quickly, not enough coffee yet... if someone wants to backpost it from email, that might be useful.

 

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InDesign actually has three features that do some variation of this (automatically apply a style to some part of a paragraph): GREP styles, Nested Styles and Line Styles. Your need is very simple; a Nested Style will do it.

 

First, create (if you haven't) a Character Style named Bold or similar. Fine-tune it for the bold look you want on these first words. (If it's not a good general bolding style, give it a distinctive name like FirstBold.)

Note: although ID has one-key bold and italic like Word, it's best not to use these overrides. ALWAYS define character styles for any applied text changes like font, color, weight, etc.

 

In your bullet paragraph style, open Drop Caps and Nested Styles. Click New Nested Style. Select your bolding style, and you can probably leave the default of through 1 Word/s as is.

All instances of this style should now bold the first word.

 

Look into the full use of this and especially GREP styles — they can automate all kinds of very tedious secondary formatting. I'm doing a programming document right now, and GREP styles are saving me whole bottles of aspirin worth of fussy formatting effort. 🙂

 

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By @James Gifford—NitroPress