Forum Discussion
Numbering and bullets in Word docs keep disappearing
I second AndrewB's response. I've used Shauna Kelly's guide for years and it always works fine on a local document. I also instruct all my users to access the Word documents only via the desktop app. In fact I have confirmed via screenshare that, with a fresh document set up correctly via Shauna's guide, with a template stored on a shared company server (NOT on a SharePoint), and with two of us in the document simultaneously, edits to bulleted lists, headings, or numbered lists, result in instability. One user may see the correct bullets and numbering on his/her screen while the other does not, and as the other user attempts to repair, the first user may lose the bullets and numbers on his/her screen. The thread is old but persistent because the issue has yet to be addressed, despite being brought to Microsoft's attention for at least 4 years.
Thank you. Yes, I used Shauna Kelly's article to set up my auto-numbered styles (lists and paragraph styles). This problem does not occur when I bring documents down and work on them locally. And it happens inconsistently. In other words, some documents are problematic, while others are not. Sounds like it's just one of the headaches we will have to deal with.
I've learned to tell my team not to worry about it and not to try to "fix" it. I wait until everyone is out of the doc, then use the organizer to reimport the problematic list and paragraph styles. It does result in extra work, especially when a new contributor joins a project and does something like type over many fields because they think the information is missing. Then I get to go back and reinsert the fields or rebuild cross-references, etc.
To clarify, this happens for all dynamic items, such as figure and table caption numbers, cross-references, doc property fields, and auto-numbered elements.
Thanks for you response.