I'm a technical writer who uses Word to produce a variety of documents ranging from 2-150 pages. My organization has a certain set of styles that are used in all of the documents we publish. Out of the blue, we started noticing that the headings in the documents were randomly changing, even though the styles themselves were never modified. Some of the bigger issues are:
- We have our headings set up for automatic numbering and, after saving a document, the font family/size/style of only the numbering changes. For instance, a heading that should be Georgia 14, bold italics, will change to Verdana 10, bold. Not only does this happen in the headings themselves, but it is also changed in the actual heading styles (even though no one has modified the style in any way).
- After saving a document, some of the heading numbers will turn blue (all text in our documents is Automatic). Again, when the heading numbers turn blue, the style itself also reflects blue numbering.
- Word inserts random page breaks throughout the document. I might scroll through a 50 page document and see NO page breaks, but after saving the document, I'll scroll back through and find multiple pages containing only one or two sentences, and the rest of the text has been moved down to the next page.
- In a few of our documents, the Heading 1 style has begun to appear with the name "Char," and when applied to any part of the text, behaves very unpredictably (changes to various fonts, sizes, etc. -- not consistent at all).
Any idea what could cause these issues? They are occuring whether the document is a year old and being updated, or is brand new from a clean template. It's becoming very time-consuming to fix them, as we often have to correct the issues multiple times before the document saves without any changes occurring. It's beyond frustrating at this point.