Forum Discussion
Numbering and bullets in Word docs keep disappearing
AndrewB_33334 I have the same issues. Some documents give me grief and others do not. I've noticed:
- Paragraph styles that suddenly act like they are mapped to a different list style. For example, my bullets will suddenly return my appendix auto-numbering.
- List styles will disappear altogether.
- Figure numbers and cross-references will disappear but can be displayed with an F9, only to disappear again.
As you've pointed out, reapplying the template fixes the problems, but I've discovered doing that when there are multiple people in the doc makes the doc increasingly unstable. I wait until everyone is out and then I update the styles based on the template.
I do not have an answer. I am very frustrated by this and wonder if our clients encounter these issues when they look at the Word docs we send them. We have some that require source and not PDF.
JessicaDavis3 My sense is that it's a SharePoint problem: if you bring the document off SharePoint and make sure that it's fine, it will stay fine from there on. However I haven't had the will to test that theory. After all these years I'm guessing that multiple authors is what causes the issues, perhaps with clashes in syncing using the desktop Word app. This is perhaps why MS pushes the terrible web version so much. For Excel we actually recommend people work in the web version if they want to co-author as it's much more stable and less prone to conflicts, however the web version of Excel is much better than Word, at least for simple Excel documents that just use the basic features.