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...
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.
AndrewB_33335 Yes, this is certainly a SharePoint issue. That's the point, though - Microsoft promotes SharePoint as a collaborative environment permitting multiple, simultaneous authors. But this template conflict issue ruins the entire endeavor. Even if the document (.docx) and the template (.dotx) are both on SharePoint, you can't point the document to the SharePoint location to find the template. Even if all users synchronize the SharePoint directory and point to their local version and un-check "automatically update document styles" in the Templates and Add-ins dialog, there are still conflicts. Even if you store the template external to SharePoint and point all users to a local drive, there are still conflicts. The only solution is to reapply, reapply, reapply the template over and over and over again until it de-synchronizes once more. It's a laughable oversight.
Thetravis12 AndrewB_33335 JessicaDavis3
This issue of the paragraph numbering disappearing when co-authoring in SharePoint has been an ongoing issue that Microsoft have been aware of for a long time. At one point is was happening so frequently that it was almost impossible to co-author. Microsoft said they had a resolution back in October 2022 and things did seem to get more stable. However the frequency of the issue has been gradually getting worse again - especially over the last 6 months.
We suggest to our clients that when it happens that everyone exits co-authoring so only one person is in the document then reset styles from the Master template.
Also encourage people to make sure the exit the document when they are not actively co-authoring ie when then go to lunch etc so the minimum number of people are co-authoring.
AndrewB_33334 , VaclavQMLogic , JessicaDavis3 the only thing we can do, I think, is continue filing complaints to Microsoft
Have you all tried messing around with Document Defaults (more on that below)? I haven't had the disappearing numbering and bullets issue for a year or two now, but have since ran into (and fixed) a new issue with fonts switching in tables while coauthoring. I think I solved the bullets and numbering issue by the hand grenade approach - deleted each of the problematic styles and rebuilt from scratch. One of the keys there is to not set any sort of numbering formatting in the paragraph style, and instead allow that to be handled by a separate Multi-Level List style, and then associate the Heading styles which the respective levels in the Multi-Level List. So Heading style has no numbering, then create a List Style (mine is called List - Headings), go to Format-> Numbering, and add your numbering/bullets formatting there, then click more and link each level to the respective Headings:
Back to Document Defaults - a counterintuitive thing that I learned is that many things in Word function as toggles. For example, if you setup a Table Style with bold in the heading row, and then apply that style to a table that already has bold in the heading, you get not bold. For that reason, I have found it to be much more stable to not modify my 'Normal' style in a template and instead go to Document Defaults and apply all the formatting I want in there - this will automatically trickle down to your 'Normal' style (and 'Table Normal' etc.). So with the issue regarding table fonts switching during coauthoring, I found that by simply setting my Document Default to Tahoma (plus whatever other size/paragraph formatting) and then leaving all of those things blank when setting up my Table Style (selecting no font) stopped this issue from happening. I think these two concepts could be related, which is why I'm rambling on about it here. Basically, when I had my 'Normal' style set to Tahoma and my Table Style set to Tahoma, it was effectively cancelling the other out (Tahoma + Tahoma = ???), and then when other users opened the file, Word didn't know what to do with it and ended up reverting back to users' defaults in their normal.dotm or the default in Word for Web, Teams, etc. So check your templates for possible redundancies that might be resulting in this toggle effect.
I hope that makes sense and is helpful to you guys. Currently I'm not having any issues with coauthoring!... for now! haha
