Forum Discussion
Numbering and bullets in Word docs keep disappearing
FYI everyone, I've been sleeping around with some other threads and found a https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/list-styles-randomly-changing-format-when/4f3c93b4-28f5-4d05-b495-611edd1d2420 (too many MS forums!!) that has a bunch of Word MVPs on it confirming what nikkipike first reported here - this is a known issue that MS is working on, and thinks they at least partially fixed in recent updates (definitely not fully, since I've had the issue since).
Best practices for living with this issue while they work on it appear to be
#1 trying to prevent people from using Word Online (although there appears to be no way to programmatically restrict this, or as I say, no way of idiot-proofing!),
#2 avoid modifying linked headings while coauthoring with tracked changes on.
#3 use a macro or otherwise train people how to reapply styles from template.
#4 When all else fails (and likely will), Drink. 
Well, my colleague and I updated to the latest version of Word (2210, Build 15726.20174) and saw no improvement in behavior. As soon as he entered the document and began making changes to the headings and bulleted lists, we saw indentations, numberings, table captions, cross-references seem to change at random. I confirmed again that he and I were both pathed to the same template and that "Automatically Update Document Styles" was unchecked in the Templates and Add-ins dialog box.
I wrote a macro to re-attach the template, override the document styles, and then toggle that checkbox off again. That partially improved matters, but the list styles don't seem to overwrite completely. I added content to the macro to individually overwrite each list style, and confirmed that it does work when the working file is stored locally on my machine, but it does not work when the file is stored on SharePoint. I get an error that the macro can't find the file, which I suspect is due to the file having a web address for a path (e.g., https://.....documentname.docx). So, my next attempt will be to write some code to sequentially select all instances of the heading styles, 1-9, all the custom bulleted list styles, and all the custom numbered list styles, and reapply both the list style and the paragraph style to each element.
This is obviously a band-aid on a bullet hole. SharePoint is specifically meant for this sort of multi-user collaboration, yet it fails catastrophically when multiple users collaborate in a document! When something is this broken in the software, what's the mechanism for raising it to Microsoft's attention?