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AndrewB_33334's avatar
AndrewB_33334
Copper Contributor
Mar 02, 2021

Numbering and bullets in Word docs keep disappearing

When working as a team on Word files within SharePoint, I constantly have problems with things like heading numbering disappearing (or changing from numbers to bullets), bullets going missing or bull...
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nikkipike's avatar
nikkipike
Copper Contributor
Oct 18, 2022

KevinN2500 @AndrewB_33335 

This is a known issue with Microsoft and in theory they have resolved the issue in the latest release of MS Word (if I remember correctly 2209). The important thing is everyone who is co-authoring needs to be on the latest version, they need to use the full Desktop version of MS Word and they need to have Auto Save on.

With this set up the problem has become less frequent but our clients are still getting issues with things changing in the document.

Having a template attached to the document with the correct styles so they can quickly reset the styles has really helped our client work around this problem.

AndrewB_33335's avatar
AndrewB_33335
Brass Contributor
Oct 18, 2022
Thanks Nikki, sounds promising. I'm on 2108 and updates are managed by my company so hopefully eventually I'll be up to date and see what happens. Will probably take a while for this bubble to flow through the system though, as we work with so many different companies, big and small, on the same SharePoint sites. I also don't like working with AutoSave on as I like to be able to commit changes when I'm happy with them: I find in PowerPoint at least you lose the ability to undo after a little while. But, I'll take that if it solves the other issue which causes me so many headaches.
  • cdarrow's avatar
    cdarrow
    Brass Contributor
    Oct 18, 2022

    nikkipike , I hope you're right! I just checked and everyone in my organization is now on 2209, which appears to have been released in September. I can say that I had the phantom list numbering issue as recently as last week (before I verified everyone being on the same version today). Would be great if the issue is magically resolved, but seems a little hopeful.

     

    Something tells me this has to be an issue with the way we are all setting up custom List Styles though - a murky topic that I still am not sure I fully understand - or at least some interaction between List Styles and the track changes/coauthoring issues where we all seem to see this happening. Whether or not that is the issue, I'd love for Microsoft devs to spend some time improving that (and table styles!!). Seems like there are a lot of invisible dependencies that I don't really understand.

     

    I still don't have a solution, but I think the silver lining is that since AndrewB_33335 's second post, when there were 900 views, we now have this thread up to 14.1k views, so this issue is at least gaining traction. Keep it active and maybe it will eventually get the attention of somebody who knows what is going on.

     

    I did notice a random thing, not sure if its related or not, but when I click into a header in some of my templates, the Level 2 numbering gets like a transparent look to it, and that is the numbering level that I most often see this issue with (although sometimes all the list numbering disappears from all levels...?). 

    I generally just click that number and hit CTRL+spacebar to clear formatting and it often fixes itself. I'm thinking it's probably a separate issue, but figured I'd throw it out there to give Microsoft's support algorithm something to chew on!

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