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AndrewB_33334's avatar
AndrewB_33334
Copper Contributor
Mar 02, 2021

Numbering and bullets in Word docs keep disappearing

When working as a team on Word files within SharePoint, I constantly have problems with things like heading numbering disappearing (or changing from numbers to bullets), bullets going missing or bull...
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Thetravis12's avatar
Thetravis12
Brass Contributor
Oct 26, 2022
I have the exact same problem, and the macro is the way I had intended to "solve" the issue. The problem, of course, is that the template attachment is not stable at the web-based SharePoint location or on the shared server of my organization; no matter where the template is located, when users enter the document, they are often pathed to their local "Normal" template. Even though I, too, am certain the "Automatically Update Document Styles" checkbox is unchecked, I see my document losing bullets, replacing bullets, swapping list types, etc., all the time. In my most recent document, my custom list styles have disappeared and been replaced with multiple copies of a list style called "Normal" which mimics the appearance of my custom list style. I can watch this behavior happen even when I am the only person in the document and the document is pathed to a location on our shared server. As the document autosaves it seems to lose track of the custom lists and their associated paragraph styles. cdarrow's proposed diagnosis led me to move the template off the SharePoint and onto a stably named location on our shared servers, but that hasn't solved the issue. I also tried using the web address of the file as opposed to the locally synched version of the template - that didn't solve the issue either. I'll try to explore the Organization Assets Library solution and I'm interested in seeing whether all my users have the latest version of MS Word, as nikkipike's comment suggests Microsoft has repaired this issue in their latest release (fingers crossed!)
  • nikkipike's avatar
    nikkipike
    Copper Contributor
    Oct 27, 2022

    Thetravis12 

    The Microsoft numbering issue seems to be partly fixed in the 2208 release. For our clients the issue seems to be less frequent but still occurring.
    One of the issues a few clients have noticed is that after resetting the paragraph styles most paragraphs are back to what they should be. However on a random set of paragraphs the actual outline number has the format changed eg the number is italic in some case or blue text in other cases. This is due to some random font formatting being applied to the paragraph mark only. By selecting the paragraph mark and pressing Ctrl+Spacebar this corrects the issue with the outline number in the selected paragraph. To stop this happening I have updated the outline numbering schemes in the templates so I have hard coded the correct font formatting of the actual outline number (eg set the font, font type (regular or bold), font size and font colour). I'm hoping this with disguise this random issue and make the users a bit more confident.
    I have also spoken to some of my legal clients who do not seem to be having any of these issues. However they don't use SharePoint (all their files are stored in iManage)!

    • cdarrow's avatar
      cdarrow
      Brass Contributor
      Oct 27, 2022

      nikkipike - out of curiosity, since making this change (assigning formatting directly to the numbering scheme in the list style), have you noticed that when you save as pdf (assuming you ever do that), the numbering converts to a bitmap image in the pdf, which in turn, gets a downsampled/compressed/blurry appearance? Just the number, not the whole heading. I have font formatting on both the heading styles and the numbering scheme and one or the other seems to be causing this problem for me. I can identify when this is going to happen by clicking in the header, and that will cause the numbering on affected headings to display somewhat transparent. Then I just go to that heading level and do the Ctrl+spacebar trick and it fixes the issue. I can't figure out if this issue is from some issue with the style linked to that level, or with the formatting applied to the numbering itself (but I suspect the latter, given that only the number is affected). I think I initially set mine up this way in an attempt to address the same problem you and Thetravis12 are describing, but eventually decided to just go through, locate all of the random italic markers, highlighted, and changed those italicized paragraph markers to "Normal" style. Have not had the italic numbering issue since, but seem to have this new issue with pdf-ing to bitmap images.

      • DougRad's avatar
        DougRad
        Copper Contributor
        Oct 27, 2022
        Actually, we have similar but different issues with the numbers from time to time, converting to PDF. Our numbers in the TOC and the headings move down into the margin on the left hand side of the page. The fix is to change the method of conversion from docx to pdf. You have "Save as Adobe PDF", "Export"-"Create Adobe PDF", and "Print"-"Adobe PDF". One method makes the oddity, the other two do not. It takes some playing with to figure out what maintains the links in the TOC and TO figures/exhibits and cross-refs, but there is a way to fix it reliably. May be a path to venture down, depending on your adobe and word versions, that may change wording though.

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