Word - Sharepoint - Styles change formatting when multiple users

Question

Hi,

We have a lot of issues with predefined styles in Word. We have a lot of personnalised styles in our documents. We have many templates which we use to create documents. When multiple users are working on a document, the styles sometimes continuously change formatting, without us wanting it to do so. We usually open all the documents in the Application (and not the browser), but we don't know if some people uses the browser.

Example of issues: 1. We have predefined a specific bullet list style. After some times, the style of the bullet list changes by itself. Even if we reupload the style, it sticks for a moment, and then changes again by itself. 2. We have sometimes the same problem with Title Styles. The numbering and tabulations change for a specific styles. 3. Another problem is that some words appear in bold or italic, or in 11 instead of 10. It doesn't matter how many times we try to fix it, the problem always comes back.

The only way we found to "fix" the styles is to download a version on the computer (not cloud linked), and work on it. However, we loses the muli-user experience, which is why we opted for Sharepoint at the begining.

Hence, how do we fix this issue? How can the styles stick and stay to the personnalised way we previously defined? It is very time consuming and daunting.

Thanks,

Cindy

Answer 1

When any editing is done in the online version, this is a problem that has been reported for a long time.
Can you isolate whether it is also a problem when all work is done in the desktop applications?

Note: this is not the place to get any changes made in Word nor the attention of developers at Microsoft. This is an independent user-to-user support forum. MS does not see anything you post here. The way to get their attention is through the feedback mechanisms.
• How do I give feedback on Microsoft Office? https://support.microsoft.com/office/2b102d44-b43f-4dd2-9ff4-23cf144cfb11
• Send Feedback to MS Developers https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/microsoft-feedback-process/6f850368-8c86-481d-a207-d95b265c4be4
• Bonus Reading related to MS Feedback system https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-windows_install/bonus-reading-related-to-ms-feedback-system/506e7654-8ced-405b-911e-c58d8f253069

While MS is aware of the problem and working on a fix, more feedback will help by giving them more data as well as keeping the pressure on.

Answer 2

Hi here is the solution to the problem that I've tested - you need to have a good document without the bad styles in them, and use this as a basis to replace all the styles. BUT you can't just copy the document over to the new template, first you have to replace all the styles in the original document, THEN copy the entire document. Otherwise if there is just one style that isn't in the new template, it'll pull over the bad styles across.

Step by step procedure here:

https://sites.google.com/site/anvilsoup/word/word-styles-changing-document-template

NOTE: You'll have to create the new template from scratch to avoid contaminating it with any broken styles from the old document.