I have a document in which I customised the heading formats. My work computer had Windows "rebuilt" (presumably similar to reinstalled?) and so the


Word (Office 365) installation is new. But none of that should make a difference because the heading settings are surely stored within the document, right?
I created a new level 3 heading and for some reason it lacks bold. I checked the heading settings and it's meant to be bold but if you look at the document
the new heading clearly is not bold! Thanks for any guidance in fixing this problem.

It is difficult to tell from the screen shot, and it depends on the font name and size, but your example heading could be bold (and italic too).

You could try a different font and see if that works better.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Your style is based on Heading 1 which is set as bold?

The Bold attribute is a toggle.

When you turn it on in Heading 3, it actually toggles it to off.

For related information, see How styles in Microsoft Word cascade by Shauna Kelly.

Here are some screenshots and a sample document that was used to generate the screenshots. The document has 9 levels of cascading heading styles.

Heading 2 is based on Heading 1. Here is the description from the Style Pane tooltip.
00 deleteme 1.png

Here are the actual settings from the Modify Style dialog. Note nothing is said about Bold but the heading is Bold because Heading 1 is Bold.
00 deleteme 2.png

Here is the tooltip about Heading 3.
00 deleteme 3.png

If in the sample document you modify Heading 1 or 2 to not be bold, look at what happens to the lower levels. They will all toggle the bold attribute. In the original document, only heading 3 is not bold. If you switch heading 1 to not be bold, then heading 3 becomes bold and all the others will become not bold. If you switch heading 2 instead, heading 1 remains bold, heading 3 becomes bold, and all the others become not bold.

Attached Files

Heading Sample.docx (30.7 KB, 6 views)