Forum Discussion
Numbering and bullets in Word docs keep disappearing
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
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).
Yes indeed; and as discussed elsewhere in this thread, the failure of Word to permit a stable template in the SharePoint environment, to me, undercuts the value of the SharePoint environment entirely. This thread was opened in March of 2021. That means this has been an issue for more than 4 years. Does anyone have a better way to communicate with Microsoft other than just hopelessly submitting the same requests through the Feedback Hub? Is there any hope that this catastrophic error will ever be fixed?
