Forum Discussion
Numbering and bullets in Word docs keep disappearing
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).
I doubt it will ever be fixed: there are bugs that have persisted in Word for decades. I assume the code is too old and the engineers don't want to fiddle with it.
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?
