Forum Discussion
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...
FYI everyone, I've been sleeping around with some other threads and found a similar discussion on the Community forum (too many MS forums!!) that has a bunch of Word MVPs on it confirming what nikkipike first reported here - this is a known issue that MS is working on, and thinks they at least partially fixed in recent updates (definitely not fully, since I've had the issue since).
Best practices for living with this issue while they work on it appear to be
#1 trying to prevent people from using Word Online (although there appears to be no way to programmatically restrict this, or as I say, no way of idiot-proofing!),
#2 avoid modifying linked headings while coauthoring with tracked changes on.
#3 use a macro or otherwise train people how to reapply styles from template.
#4 When all else fails (and likely will), Drink. 
Well, my colleague and I updated to the latest version of Word (2210, Build 15726.20174) and saw no improvement in behavior. As soon as he entered the document and began making changes to the headings and bulleted lists, we saw indentations, numberings, table captions, cross-references seem to change at random. I confirmed again that he and I were both pathed to the same template and that "Automatically Update Document Styles" was unchecked in the Templates and Add-ins dialog box.
I wrote a macro to re-attach the template, override the document styles, and then toggle that checkbox off again. That partially improved matters, but the list styles don't seem to overwrite completely. I added content to the macro to individually overwrite each list style, and confirmed that it does work when the working file is stored locally on my machine, but it does not work when the file is stored on SharePoint. I get an error that the macro can't find the file, which I suspect is due to the file having a web address for a path (e.g., https://.....documentname.docx). So, my next attempt will be to write some code to sequentially select all instances of the heading styles, 1-9, all the custom bulleted list styles, and all the custom numbered list styles, and reapply both the list style and the paragraph style to each element.
This is obviously a band-aid on a bullet hole. SharePoint is specifically meant for this sort of multi-user collaboration, yet it fails catastrophically when multiple users collaborate in a document! When something is this broken in the software, what's the mechanism for raising it to Microsoft's attention?
- With respect to the built in List / Bullet style in Word I never use these and try and keep people away from using these styles as they randomly seem to change to what they were when last used (perhaps in a completely different document) you updated. I also keep them away of the bullet and numbered buttons on the Paragraph group in the Home tab.
I always create a set of new paragraph styles for list numbers and bullets and then I then list together in an outline number list. I think make sure the Styles pane is updated to list the styles they should be using. This way the reset styles works as expected.
Not sure this is of any help.- Here's a new one: yesterday I had a file where my usual macro to replace the styles threw up an error. The macro first reads the starting number of the list style that drives the headings, so that if it's schedule 12, the headings start with 12.1. In this case, the line where it read the list style starting number failed because it couldn't find the list style. I looked in the doc in the list drop down and yep, it wasn't there. Somehow the entire list style went missing.
HOWEVER I went into the style manager, scrolled down to my lists, and there it was in the list! It appears that Word reads it from the drop down though as the macro referenced it and it gave an error. Once I manually relinked the template and refreshed the styles, the list style appeared in the drop down again and the macro worked.
I rewrote the macro so that it will try to get the starting number from the document title, refresh the styles, then put that number in which achieves the same result, but these workarounds are getting ridiculous. This is the first time the list style not only cleared the reference to the styles linked to it, but disappeared completely.
