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...
I was wondering if anyone has been experiencing Cross References number temporarily disappearing from the document while co-authoring.
We have a client with a large document (700+ page). All the text paragraphs are numbered (x.xxx). I saw on screen the document not showing the results of the cross reference ( in the document you could see 'see paragraph where' - there where two spaces it should have read 'see paragraph 2.345 where'). If you select the text and press F9 then the cross reference is re-displayed.
When being shown this on screen I could see the number re displaying (on pressing F9) but then I saw it disappear again a few seconds later.
Using the option to highlight all Field codes text does no help because the field code is returning nothing so nothing is highlighted in grey.
The client is now inserting two XX and highlight in yellow before each cross reference so other users know there is a valid cross reference it just is not visible.
This is definitely happening when 2-3 people are coauthoring. I have no confirmation of it happening when the document is not being co-authored.
This is driving the users round the bend as they are trying to check all the cross references prior to publication.
Has anyone else experienced this behavior?
MS Office version being used is: 2406 (Monthly Enterprise channel)
Yes I also have this issue. I have a macro that updates all of the fields in a document and that makes them all appear again however it's irritating as they appear and disappear at random. I see it mostly with figures and tables, where the caption will just say "Table:" without the number.
AndrewB_33335 For tables, I heard there were a few word updates KB 3213656 and KB 4011039 that caused dissappearing issues and removing them fixed the issues. But if you have a macro, you might add an export at the end to a pdf or doc or rtf format to freeze the content. Word docs can be so painful for these issues.
- That looks to be a separate issue, not caption numbering disappearing. But while we're on tables, I can also mention the way that co-authoring destroys table formatting with misaligned columns etc, particularly when you have merged cells!
nikkipike Yes, it happened for us when building RFP documents for tenders. It was mostly title styles and numbering that kept disappearing with some editors and would come back when document owners reviewed the doc. Apparently users had conflicting settings (word cache overgrown, autosave disabled for some or enabled for other, update normal.dot enabled vs disabled for other, etc).
For us, there were 3 possible fixes (We used 1 and 2 below, to fix this word issue):
1) Everyone enabled autosave, to avoid some users with autosave overwriting text before other users without autosave had saved their edits. Note: We cleaned word caches in File > Options, for some users where cache sizes of 2-3Gb prevented autosave.
2) Removing auto-update for TOC or styles:
- For TOC, you can go into TOC > Modify > then for each TOC 1, TOC 2, TOC 3..., remove auto-update to avoid one user applying a TOC style and updating it by accident.
- For titles, you can go into the Styles gallery, then Modify > Remove auto-update for H1, H2, H3, H4...3) The most radical 'fix' is to lock the styles for editors, so that they cannot change the table of contents or styles. You can do this in tab File > Info > Protect document > Restrict editing > Formatting restrictions > Check 'Limit formatting' > Settings > Select styles TOC1/2/3/4... > Restrict permission.
