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
Here is an updated link to what I have on the Hierarchy of Formatting and Styles.
cdarrow No apologies needed, my friend. I, too, am quite stubborn (you'd have to be to make MS Word templates, right?)
Hmm... interesting point about the building blocks. I do indeed make use of those for tables, call-outs, quotes, and other little doo-hickeys that the marketing folks like to use. But I never use bulleted lists or headings in those, so I don't think they're the culprit.
I did try that "New Template" button in SharePoint - got demigod-tier privileges from IT on a test site (I think the proper term is site collection administrator, in current SharePoint parlance). But, my recollection is that this button launches a .docx that inherits the settings from that template, as opposed to linking to that template. As you mentioned, I like to use building blocks - those don't work unless the .dotx template is attached to the .docx. And, if you store a .dotx template on a SharePoint, and link a .docx to that .dotx web address, it will eventually lose this association (in my experience) and default back to your normal template.
It really seems like there should be a way to store a template on a SharePoint site and tell a .docx on the same SharePoint site "Look here for all your settings."
Maybe that's possible through the Organization Assets Library? But, I ran out of gumption to keep chasing that rabbit. I think I probably still have an out-standing ticket with my IT department for development of an Organization Assets Library, I just haven't asked them about it in a year. They don't seem to be in a hurry to implement the solution!
Thetravis12 sorry, didn't mean my comment about pride as a slight to you, just was true of my experience (wife tells me I'm stubborn). Trust me, I'm with you on Microsoft needing to come up with a better/more intuitive solution, I'm just also a skeptic/fatalist about whether they actually care about template dev features. One thing I thought of with your situation was that it sounds like you use a lot of quick parts / building blocks - I've seen where those can cause old, conflicting styles to make their way back into documents after you've deleted/replaced them - if you have any numbering / bullet lists in any of those, you might want to check and update those after rebuild too, to prevent anything old from sneaking back in (Speaking of things microsoft needs to fix... Building Block editor...). That said, the 'ground-up' rebuild doesn't have to be as daunting as it sounds - I just deleted my normal.dotm to make sure I was using a stock version, created a default blank doc, changed all the document defaults, and then copied over the original template text (without formatting), and then I imported all of my styles from the old templates except for the ones that could possibly be contributing to this issue (for me that was Normal, Headings 1-4, List styles/multi-level lists, and custom table styles), and then re-applied formatting to the doc and added my content controls back in using advanced find. It was a pain, but it's not like I manually re-did every style and re-typed the thing, so it took about a half day for each template.
HJLDocs yours sounds a lot like a 'can't find the template' issue - do you know (/provide instructions on) where your clients are storing the template, how they are launching it, and whether it is a network location that is visible to all users? See my previous post on this thread about that, if you haven't seen that already.
Since it sounds like neither of you have access to Sharepoint admin, I was curious if you are at least able to see this "+Add template" button on the new menu in a sharepoint library?
If so, that might be another good option for you to test - you'll just want to pay attention to sharepoint permissions to make sure users can read but not edit the template file. That method will also give you/your users a network-based template location that could help with the issue. I'll just warn in advanced - if you then get interested in adding Sharepoint Document Properties and Sharepoint Content Types to your templates, you're in for yet another set of headaches/disappointments! haha - I have another thread for those grievances though.
Good luck!
Thanks Charles_Kenyon, I've edited my post and updated with the link you provided.
