bullet points misbehaving

[colmack]

:confused:
Since yesterday, when using Word 2003 (Office XP Home) I've been experiencing very annoying behaviour when using bullet points.

Imagine a list of three lines in a longer document, with Enter pressed at the end of each line. If I highlight two of the three lines and bullet-point them, no problem. But when I try to insert a 'second level' bullet point to one of those lines by placing the cursor and clicking on the Increase Indent button, the new bullet applies itself to every line in the whole document instead of just the one I want it to.

The same thing happens with other formatting, ie Bold, Centre, etc.

Pressing Ctrl+Z returns things to how they should be - but it's very annoying to have to do this all the time!

This started happening when I began working on a document several years old, but it occurs now with a New document as well.

Has anyone else had the same problem, or can anyone suggest what I might do to fix it? And what might be the cause in the first place?

This happens whether I go via the Bullets button on the Formatting Toolbar or Format>Bullets & Numbering>Outline Numbered.

I have Norton AV (completely updated) and I run weekly virus checks of the whole system - last night's scan showed no problems.

[johnboy]

Try a Repair

Click "Help" - "Detect and Repair".
2. Read the dialog box text. This feature will try to automatically find and fix errors in all Office files.
hth

[godfather]

Go to this site
http://www.officearticles.com/word/steps_to_troubleshooting_microsoft_word.htm
Go down to Step 1 and start there.

This will eliminate the liklihood that your "normal.dot" template is not corrupted, as that is the most common fault with Word operation.

Reinstalling or repairing Word, does not fix a corrupt "normal.dot" problem as its a file created by Word when it first runs.

Deleting it means a new one will be created, all you lose are any customised defult settings which you can easily recreate.

[FoxyMX]

It sounds like the "style" for the old document has applied itself to the entire document rather than just the appropriate paragraph/s and has gone and affected the normal.dot template which Word uses for all new documents.

If you know and understand "styles" you can fix it by changing paragraphs as required otherwise the simplest way is to delete the normal.dot file as detailed in the link Godfather provided.

Like Godfather says, however, you will lose a bit of formatting which will need to be redone in your document/s.

[godfather]

Like Godfather says, however, you will lose a bit of formatting which will need to be redone in your document/s.

You should lose no formatting in the existing documents. Only the default settings in new documents may need to be reset (font size etc)

[FoxyMX]

Ah... it has been a very long while since I last had to reset my normal.dot template so I couldn't remember whether this was the case or not. Thanks for clearing that up. :)

[godfather]

Its just too early in the morning for you.

[colmack]

Of course - I should have thought of that myself! Normal.dot is now OK - and so is Word. Thanks.

I was able to use a safety precaution that I'd taken some time ago (and forgotten about - duh). I have quite a complicated set of customised toolbars etc and so I made a copy of Normal.dot. Thus, today, all I had to do was delete the old (corrupt) Normal.dot, change the name of the copy, and all was right again.