Forum Discussion
Numbering and bullets in Word docs keep disappearing
Thetravis12 I definitely encourage you to try setting document defaults, as this is the base of the pyramid in the https://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/styles.htm#Hierarchy (credit and thanks to Word MVP Charles_Kenyon who further credits Jonathan Bailor) and will carry through as defaults in your new documents without needing to look back to the template:
"the hierarchy of formatting and Styles in a Word document is as follows:
- document defaults are the base (found on the Set Defaults tab of the Manage Styles dialog box) control unless one or more of the following are applied
- http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/numbering20072010.html unless one or more of the following are applied
- table style unless one of the following are applied
- paragraph style unless one or more of the following are applied
- character style unless direct formatting is applied
- direct formatting"
I like to imagine this as a stack of transparencies, each adding specific elements, which adds or subtracts from the layers below - except where any two layers share the same element, they cancel each other out leaving Word with no instructions, at which point it is going to seek an answer from the individual user's normal.dotm. My sense (lacking any legit programming credentials), from countless hours of testing/pulling out my hair, is that this is where the issues with sharepoint and coauthoring come into play. So, if you create a template with some minor invisible layering issue, you (as the dev) are not going to be able to easily see when Word has to ask your local normal.dotm for help (since your local normal.dotm will presumably be unchanged during testing, perhaps even over many years of using the same templates), until it goes out 'into the wild'. This is when those instances of reverting to normal.dotm are going to be exposed, since different users are going to have minor inconsistencies, and thus are going to give different results - also different versions of Word (e.g., Word for Web, embedded in Teams, etc.) have different defaults for Font, Size, Spacing (Aptos vs. Calibri vs. Sitka, etc.), which is why I avoid leaving anything in the defaults as +Body as HJLDocs referenced. The goal is to eliminate any possible instance where Word might be inadvertently left without instructions (due to the toggle switch effect in these layers), and require using anyone's normal.dotm.
Best practice, for me, was to make sure every available 'Document Default', 'Default Font', etc. was robust and set consistently, then let them dictate 'Normal', 'Table Normal', etc., then meticulously redoing everything up the hierarchy (list styles, table styles, etc.) by assigning as little as humanly possible as I went up the ladder (i.e., if your doc defaults are 11pt Tahoma, and I want my tables to be 10pt Tahoma, then I would ONLY assign a font size in the table style, leaving font and everything else blank). After rebuilding, I saw most of these coauthoring issues disappear immediately. The one exception being attempting to do bulk style/formatting edits while coauthoring with Track Changes is enabled - that I have determined is a separate issue, where you are actually corrupting the document by attempting to edit lines that are currently locked out by other users' cursor position. The good news is, you won't find yourself doing as many of those bulk edits if you are able to find and eliminate your hidden layering issues!
It took me a long time to accept that MY PRECIOUS TEMPLATES could be the problem, but in the end was able to mitigate the bullets/numbering and table issues by swallowing my pride and starting back from scratch. Face it, you are probably WAY better at building templates now than when you first started building your current template sets, or even when AndrewB_33334 started this thread (3 years ago!), so your problem could be lingering from some mistake you made years ago and have been copying into your new templates. That's just my (TLDR) two cents! Don't take my word for it, I'm just regurgitating what I've learned from Charles Kenyon, Stefan Blom, Shauna Kelly, and all the other Word MVPs who I owe a debt of gratitude!
Other nods/recommended reading:
https://forum.leonrenner.com/microsoft-word/word-table-style-font-size-not-changing/
https://shaunakelly.com/word/bullets/controlbullets20072010.html
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/table-styles/b1946f1a-64d3-4026-90e7-2f5afaa12b36
cdarrow Thank you for this thoughtful reply.
The resources you linked are great - I will say I've been through Shauna Kelley's article backwards and forwards about a dozen times, but no amount of rebuilding has ever removed this instability.
I don't really consider it a point of pride that my templates couldn't be responsible for the instability. If there is any workaround that defeats this instability, I'll be happy to take it. That doesn't mean that Microsoft couldn't improve the stability through other means. In 3 years, I've heard every solution under the sun for how this can be corrected, and none of them have worked. Additionally, some of the solutions are somewhat impractical; if you work for an organization of tens of thousands of people, and that organization performs upgrades on a regular schedule, the idea that all users just need to be upgraded to the latest version of the software whenever it is released is a tough sell that would probably require buy-in from the CTO. And anyway, that's a solution I already pursued, once - making sure all the members of my immediate team had put in and executed a special request with IT to be upgraded to the newest form of MS Word, where this issue was supposedly fixed, only to watch the exact same instability recur in real time.
I haven't tried out the solution that proposes development of an Organizational Assets Library. I tried to execute this with our IT department but they're pretty uninterested; it seems to require the use of https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/organization-assets-library and requires organization-level buy-in - again likely from a company-wide SharePoint administrator and/or the CTO. I want a stable template that my team can use, in the collaborative environment built by Microsoft. I shouldn't have to move heaven and earth to do it.
That said, I will see if I can make some time to try out the solution that rebuilds our current template from the ground-up, starting with document defaults and walking up the style hierarchy. If that works, I'll be overjoyed. But, I'm a little fatalistic at this point, having tried a dozen solutions already over the years. I fear this is just a known instability in the Microsoft software and there is nothing any individual user can do to fix it.
In the meantime, if anyone else rebuilds their template per cdarrow's suggested procedure, and finds that it cures the instability of disappearing bullets, disappearing heading numbers, etc., please post your success story here.
Thetravis12 and cdarrow
I also have not had any luck experimenting with suggested fixes, and I do already follow the hierarchy of style mentioned by Charles_Kenyon (thank you!) when creating my templates, along with the late, great, Shauna Kelly's list and table style rules. I too have never experienced this issue (bullets/numbering disappearing) when working in any template I have created when testing on my system with my own Normal.dotm file, and as a sole proprietor who creates 100s of templates for companies with many different brand guidelines, my default styles never match those that I'm designing for others, and I only see this issue come up when they start using the templates within their SharePoint environment while sharing the files during editing. I do hope that this is fixed one day, as it causes a lot of frustration for everyone involved.
- Oh, PS cdarrow. My Normal.dotm never matches the company-developed template or the project-specific template I've developed, but I never see this instability if I'm the only person working in the document. If the issue were a mis-match between my normal.dotm and the document's attached, custom template, I would expect to see this issue rear its ugly head by reaching for resolution from my local .dotm whenever there is ambiguity. My normal.dotm is never changed from the factory-default issued by MS Word so if your hypothesis is correct I think the instability should grab a totally different font, spacing, etc. from my local normal.dotm and load it into the document when trying to resolve mis-matches between styles at different hierarchical levels. That is not a behavior I see so I'm a little skeptical that this will lead to resolution. Still, like I said, I'm willing to give it a try.
