Greetings,


First, let me apologize if this is a duplicate. We had a power glitch as I tried to post this and my laptop froze. I don't know if it went through.

I’m pretty handy with Word although I wouldn’t call myself an expert. I’ve run into a problem that I cannot solve, hence my posting. My employer has us all using Office 365 (much to my disgust) so I have whatever today’s current version of Word 16 is.



I have documents in the .docx format that we use as templates for standardized process instructions. We use .docx instead of .dotx to maintain positive revision control. We are transitioning to a new document control system and I may be able to use .dotx after the changeover has been completed.

I have custom styles in my template that set paragraph numbering, indent, etc. to make it easier for the end users to maintain the appropriate format. Three times now over the past 6 months a one of my custom styles has become corrupted on documents in the process of being created/revised.

The corruption manifests as blacked out paragraph numbers, the look like they’ve been redacted. Everything in the style is set correctly and everything functions properly except you can’t see the numbers, they are simply solid black rectangles.

The only way I have been able to fix the document with the corrupt style is to delete the offending style and then import a clean copy from an uncorrupted document.

Has anyone experienced anything like this before, and if so, what was the source of the corruption and what was the solution to keep it from happening again?

Thanks in advance for your time and assistance. Any help is greatly appreciated.

~ Phil