Our company has just recently moved to Office 2007, and I have been modifying our templates to a new design as well. One particular mystery continues to elude a clear answer in my web research.


In our new corporate proposal template, the Heading 1 style has Page Break Before set, and has the typical multilevel numbering built into the style (1, 1.1, 1.2, 2, 2.1, etc.). The Following Paragraph style is our body text. All is well so far. After styling a Heading 1 and pressing enter, you get the body paragraph. But, when you then press backspace, instead of returning the cursor to the heading, a second Heading 1 is created on the next page (since the style has a page break before). This can be repeated, ad infinitum.

I tried this on Word’s default Heading 1 in the Normal template, and discovered that it only happens when using numbering.

Furthermore, when I go through the style modification dialogue for our custom style, the numbering tab indicates that NO numbering is being used, even thought it certainly is!

I have looked up this issue, and found various posts on NOT including the numbering in the style. I tried recreating the style by using the multilevel list numbering in the ribbon and attaching Heading1 style to it, but nothing changes; still the surprising behavior.

What's going on?