Hi all,

I work in a business where I'm making a lot of templates that are used for large projects across the country. This is all SharePoint based. I'm well aware of the problems that co-authoring creates in SharePoint and therefore have a custom ribbon with tools for "cleaning up" the document, including an "update styles" button that refreshes the style definition from the template which is also stored on SharePoint.

In the past week or maybe two weeks a new issue has popped up where all the table style definitions are getting messed up, losing some header colours and most of their cell borders. Refreshing the styles doesn't seem to fix this. The tables themselves are also going funny, with things like shading everywhere except the first column, no header colour etc. If I refresh the document styles the definitions will sometimes come back however the only way to get the tables back to normal is to re-apply the table style, which of course is tedious and clears any local formatting.

There was an update to Word around about the same time this started, although I did also update my macro around the same time. The only thing I really changed was that it opened a copy of the template hidden and read only before updating it, as people were always getting a "template is locked by xxxx" message as I have the template locations restricted to read only. I can't see why this could change anything.

So, has anyone else who works with docs on SharePoint noticed this happening to them? I've attached what they should look like vs what they end up looking like.

Attached Images

	Screenshot 2025-11-05 141409.png (15.8 KB, 13 views)
	Screenshot 2025-11-05 141302.png (16.9 KB, 11 views)

Adding to this: I've had some success (although inconsistent) using the organiser to re-import the styles as opposed to the document.updatestyles route in the macro (same as ticking & unticking the "Automatically update document styles" box).

That didn't fix the Table gallery which still showed everything without borders, however going into "modify style" for one of my styles and pressing OK without doing anything caused the gallery to refresh and bam, it was back to normal.

Obligatory "Why must we jump through to many hurdles to get this to work properly?"

A couple of points:

1. Table Styles have always been more complicated than paragraph/character styles.
2. Word's treatment of templates in SharePoint has been less than ideal.

My experience with SharePoint is virtually nil.


That said, is Workgroup Templates instead of SharePoint for this storage an option?

Thanks for your response Charles! I think it is less to do with the template being in SharePoint and more how SharePoint interacts with Word doc, particularly when co-authoring. My sense is that something has changed in the past few weeks which is how messing up tables even more than they usually would be and I'm trying to see if anyone else is having this issue. Part of the running saga I have on another forum site which people occasionally add their voice to:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...earing/2176730

I don't think Workgroup templates will work for me as not everyone working on these is a company employee: we work with a lot of JV partners who are remote or even if working in our office they won't have proper access to our network. In any case the only reason I need the template available is due to the way that the documents are constantly getting messed up. Co-authoring is so problematic however I don't think we could go back to any other way of working unfortunately. I just had hoped that the world's largest software company might have fixed these issues after a decade!

Whilst you can store copies of dotx and dotm templates in Sharepoint, I don't ever expect the template to work with documents while they are there. I always have the templates loaded into my User Templates folder (and have IT run scripts to deliver updates to people's machines). Then the users can open any document and the template gets found automatically.

I believe (without real proof) that documents get confused when people edit documents in Browser mode rather than opening the desktop app. Unfortunately, Sharepoint makes it way too easy for authors to make quick edits via the browser.

That said, I have not had problems with table styles changing randomly. I would firstly check that you don't have multiple copies of templates sitting in various locations. When Word opens a document, it reads the name of the attached template and then goes looking for a template with the same name in at least FOUR different locations. Also verify that the "Automatically update styles" setting is not turned on.

Another area to check is the color palette - if the table styles were coloured using design palette colours then if those colours change the table will display that change.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

See In a coauthored Word document, table formats get corrupted - Microsoft Support.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

What versions of Word are being used? Accessing Word files in SharePoint using the web version of Office 365 will generally hose regular formatting; I would not be surprised if tables got hosed as well.

Oh this is gold: exactly what I’m looking for! Glad to know it’s an actual bug. Now, I wonder how long the fix will take to get to me, given our IT update schedule…

Thanks Stefan!

You are welcome.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

They actually work pretty well: my script to refresh styles has got fairly complex but if it can't resolve the correct template it pops up a list of templates that's stored in an Excel file which is... also on SharePoint! The macro can also resolve a OneDrive link to the proper SharePoint link which is handy. If someone manually updates it to their local synced SharePoint link, the next person to run the script will change it to the SharePoint location. This is good because I have a standard macro in the template itself that runs a very basic update styles which I have in the QAT so even people without the ribbon can refresh the styles. It's a Rube Goldberg machine of a thing but I feel it's appropriate given how I assume the modern co-authoring features have been built on top of the original 90s MS Word code.

I don't discount this as a thing... however I'll flip this around and posit that modern co-authoring features have been designed with the online version in mind and it's doing so within the app that causes all the trouble as it was never properly designed for it. Obviously Word online is terrible and can't actually be used except for the simplest of documents, given it can't show images or tables properly.

I say this because I've given people the tip that if they want to co-author in Excel they should do so in the online version as that seems to give far fewer problems. People working in shared workbooks in Excel often end up "disconnected" and having to manually reconcile changes because something has gone wrong during sync, which doesn't happen when working online. Again this isn't always feasible as the web version doesn't have the full feature set.

Stefan has very kindly found a tech note that has acknowledged this as a problem so hopefully this problem has been fixed now: as I said in another post I'm not sure how quickly this will help me as it seemed the problem started with a major company-wide update and I'm not sure how often these updates get pushed to our machines.

In any case the past week has been difficult as multiple reports of this trickled through to me from all parts of the country and I had no easy fix for anyone apart from "Uhhh you can do a refresh/try bringing styles in via the organiser or failing that reapply the table style and manually add back any formatting you had...?" while also wondering if all my macro shenanigans might be causing it in the first place!

In the back of my mind I do wonder, as the frequency of styles going haywire increases the closer we get to deadline, which coincides with people having to refresh the styles more often. It's almost like refreshing the styles wears the document out!