I’d like to ask a question, knowing that the answer could be difficult to pin down. But it’s worth a try.

At my job, we use a custom template I created, with heading list style set up per Shauna Kelly, using the 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, etc. format. One of our newer department members is having trouble with the numbers sometimes, and partially, appearing as black boxes when she sends templates or documents based on them to someone else.

I know how to clear this, but it's ot holding. Even when I return a clean document or template to her by email (Outlook), when she copies it o her desktop and opens it, one level of heading numbers has turned to a black box again; when this is cleared, the font size may be too small. In the most recent case, this affected level 2 alone.

I sat with her this afternoon to take it step by step, and found:

When she opened the template as either template or document, although the list style showed that the heading levels remained linked to headings properly, the font name (Arial) and the size for levels 2 and 4 had disappeared; level 3 was missing the size.
We reset the headings in the list style in the template and saved. When she returned the template to me, the problem reappeared when I opened it—black numbers for level 2, one of the level 2 heads showing the wrong size (other level 2s were correct!, and this time font, format, and size all missing in the list style.

The same template, fixed on my machine and sent to another person in the department by me was fine.

I looked through all my colleague’s Word options and found nothing that stood out to me as a possible troublemaker, but clearly something is amiss. Web searches turn up plenty of fixes for the numbering but only “corruption” listed as the cause.
These are two-page documents at this point, litle but headings and text placeholders. I tried copying the flawed one to a new document without the final pilcrow but got a new copy with the same errors.

Anyone have an idea where the gremlin may lie?

Thanks.