I can certainly reproduce the behavior in your document, so I guess this must be some sort of document corruption, although it's nothing I have seen before.



Is it OK if I share your file with some fellow MVPs?

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

I know it's handy to blame "document corruption", but it's pretty hard to see it in this situation unless all of my documents are corrupted. I can reproduce that error in a brand new document. In fact, those two documents were created from scratch.

I suppose it could be corruption in the Normal style, but then wouldn't it have to be your Normal style, too?

My money is on one of the thousands of bugs in this very buggy software. Want to wager? Not that we'll ever find out for sure.

I should ask Woody Leonhard. :-)

Sure, show it to anyone.

Obviously, before suggesting document corruption, I tested in a new, blank document on my system, and I was unable to reproduce the issue.

You should try renaming your Normal template, with Word closed. A new template with factory defaults will be recreated the next time you start Word. Then can you reproduce the problem?

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

OK, I have made some additional tests and the issue seems to be with numbered paragraphs (that is, not just numbered headings) that are formatted as hidden. It appears to be a bug.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional