Some footnotes lose their style after joining documents

I have a multi-chapter document. Each chapter is in a separate Word file, and each one is supposed to use the same styles. Each chapter also has more than a 100 footnotes (with reference within text). The footnotes all have the style "Footnote Text"

Before rendering the final document, I join all chapters by inserting a section break and and then Insert -> File.

What happens is that some footnotes (maybe 5 out of more than 100 in a document) lose their style and become Heading 1 or Heading 2. What strange is, that it is usually the "same" footnote text (reference to the same book for example). But if I check the source document, the whole text of that footnote really has the "Footnote Text" style, I don't see even one character from that note having another style.

So what I did was to remove formatting of that note in the source file, re-apply the "Footnote Text" format, and try to re-join the documents. The note in questions then shows up OK, but another note, previously fine in the first join attempt, now has the wrong "Heading 1" style.

At first I thought this might have had something to do with copy paste from another document, with the footnote text somehow "retaining" the style from the file it was copied from, but since it seems to happen to a new note after fixing one, I am a bit lost. Besides, even if the style was retained, I should see something else than "Footnote Text" in the style in the original chapter document, right?

Is this a known problem when joining documents? Am I doing something wrong?

any idea?

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The problem may be indicative of some corruption in one or more of the documents. It's difficult to say whether that corruption is in the source documents or the target document. Corrupt documents can often be 'repaired' by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it.
Cheers
Paul Edstein
(Fmr MS MVP - Word)

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Last updated October 5, 2021 Views 52 Applies to: