Forum Discussion
Numbering and bullets in Word docs keep disappearing
AndrewB_33334 , VaclavQMLogic , JessicaDavis3 the only thing we can do, I think, is continue https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-do-i-give-feedback-on-microsoft-365-2b102d44-b43f-4dd2-9ff4-23cf144cfb11#:~:text=From%20your%20app%2C%20go%20to%20Help%20%3E%20Feedback.,From%20your%20app%2C%20go%20to%20File%20%3E%20Feedback to Microsoft
Have you all tried messing around with Document Defaults (more on that below)? I haven't had the disappearing numbering and bullets issue for a year or two now, but have since ran into (and fixed) a new issue with fonts switching in tables while coauthoring. I think I solved the bullets and numbering issue by the hand grenade approach - deleted each of the problematic styles and rebuilt from scratch. One of the keys there is to not set any sort of numbering formatting in the paragraph style, and instead allow that to be handled by a separate Multi-Level List style, and then associate the Heading styles which the respective levels in the Multi-Level List. So Heading style has no numbering, then create a List Style (mine is called List - Headings), go to Format-> Numbering, and add your numbering/bullets formatting there, then click more and link each level to the respective Headings:
Back to Document Defaults - a counterintuitive thing that I learned is that many things in Word function as toggles. For example, if you setup a Table Style with bold in the heading row, and then apply that style to a table that already has bold in the heading, you get not bold. For that reason, I have found it to be much more stable to not modify my 'Normal' style in a template and instead go to Document Defaults and apply all the formatting I want in there - this will automatically trickle down to your 'Normal' style (and 'Table Normal' etc.). So with the issue regarding table fonts switching during coauthoring, I found that by simply setting my Document Default to Tahoma (plus whatever other size/paragraph formatting) and then leaving all of those things blank when setting up my Table Style (selecting no font) stopped this issue from happening. I think these two concepts could be related, which is why I'm rambling on about it here. Basically, when I had my 'Normal' style set to Tahoma and my Table Style set to Tahoma, it was effectively cancelling the other out (Tahoma + Tahoma = ???), and then when other users opened the file, Word didn't know what to do with it and ended up reverting back to users' defaults in their normal.dotm or the default in Word for Web, Teams, etc. So check your templates for possible redundancies that might be resulting in this toggle effect.
I hope that makes sense and is helpful to you guys. Currently I'm not having any issues with coauthoring!... for now! haha
cdarrow To address the first part of your post; I find that when I set up a paragraph style to have no numbering, and a list style to use that paragraph style, once the list style is applied to an instance of that paragraph style, re-examining the paragraph style in the Modify Style dialog box shows that the paragraph style has inherited the numbering from the list style.
As regards your second point, on document defaults; no, I've not tried experimenting with that, but I can confirm that I, too, experienced the problem with conflict between settings given to table styles, and settings given to the text used inside the table style. You cannot tell a table style which paragraph styles you'd like it to use for headings, first row, last row, etc. My workaround for this has been to create a table style, insert a table of some standard size (say, 5x5), assign my paragraph styles within the table as desired, then highlight the whole thing and make it into a quickpart (Insert > Quick Parts > Save Selection to QuickPart Gallery). If you save this to the "Tables" gallery, your pre-set table should appear as an option in your "Quick Tables" (available from Insert > Table > QuickTables). Further, if you give it a handy name, like "_5x5TBL", just by typing the name and hitting F3, your saved quickpart will appear. You can include a caption when you create the quickpart too, so it will come in auto-captioned, if you like.
I know that's not quite what you asked; I haven't messed with the defaults because it doesn't sound like that's going to achieve what I want; I want to be able to insert a table where the paragraph styles of the contents match the paragraph styles I intend to use. That's been my best solution so far.
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.
- I appreciate your help. I've set up my paragraph, list, and table styles as you described. I've used these templates without these issues for 10 years. The problem described didn't start happening until we began collaborative editing via SharePoint. Also, these problems do not occur when one person is in the file even though the file is on SharePoint. They only happen when multiple people are in the file. This seems to be an issue with the way Word integrates the various changes multiple users make. They are corrected by reapplying the template but the fix does not stick, meaning the problems recur.
Note: we use the desktop app, not the browser.
These are good practices to follow.
I personally do set up all of my templates using this method (set document themes for colour and fonts, set the default font, and then all styles set to either "Body" or "Heading" default rather than the specific font, set up any tables as Table styles, etc.) and I only ever use either multi-level lists or list styles linked to the document styles to set all heading numbering, numbered lists, and bulleted lists, but I continue to have the disappearing bullet/numbered list issue. It doesn't tend to happen to the Heading styles in my experience, at least not with the same frequency as it does the bulleted styles.
I had a new issue today where a template that I have set to "Block Theme or Scheme switching" and "Block switching to a different style set" magically switched themes in mid-use so all of the colours and default fonts changed. I have no idea how or why this happened and it is the first time I've seen that happen when I have set these two settings to be blocked (which greys out any of the options in the "Design" tab). I hope this isn't the start of a new issue!
Hi here is the solution to the problem that I've tested - you need to have a good document without the bad numbering styles in them, and use this as a basis to replace all the styles. BUT you can't just copy the document over to the new template, first you have to replace all the styles in the original document, THEN copy the entire document. Otherwise if there is just one style that isn't in the new template, it'll pull over the bad styles across.
- Create a new good template from scratch to avoid contaminating it with any broken styles from the old document.
- In the broken document, open the Styles pane.
- Open the Style Organizer, and copy over all the styles from the new good template.
- Select all, and copy to clipboard all the contents of the original document to clipboard.
- Open up a new document based on the target template.
- Paste from clipboard all the contents into this new document.
This has something to do with SharePoint and multiple authors. I have a lot of variables since we have Mac and PC users. All my styles are set properly, that is I use list styles with paragraph styles mapped to each level of the list. This issue does not occur when I'm in the document alone or if I'm working on a document that is local. However, when several people edit the document at once, I see all the sorts of issues. Stuff like cross-references, doc property fields, figure numbers, and table numbers disappear. An update (Ctrl+A, F9) brings them back, but then they disappear again. Also, I sometimes see list styles go wonky, like Word has decided to remap my paragraph styles to different list styles. For example, bullets may become numbers or Notes (an autonumbered style that returns "Notes" suddenly returns the numbering for Appendixes (Appendix A, Appendix B, etc.). If I try to fix these issues while folks are in the document, the wonkiness increases. If I ask everyone to get out of the document, I can import the offending styles via the organizer and the fix lasts longer. To deal with all these issues, I've changed my process. When the document is done, I bring it down locally to repair any outstanding style or field issues before I produce output (PDFs).
