Disappearing Text

[Mike Gage]

I am running Microsoft Word 2002 (10.5522.4219) SP-2. I
defined Headings 1, 2, 3, and 4. I have about 20 pages of
text where everything has worked fine.

I wanted to insert some Heading 4's (under a Heading 3, of
course), with titles that corresponded to a bulleted list
in another paragraph. I copied and pasted the bulleted
list to where I wanted the new headings; I clicked the
bulleted list icon to remove the bullets, and, while the
text was still highlighted, I selected Heading 4. My
document map showed the items as I would have expected,
but there was no visible text on the page. Now, any time
I try to insert a new heading, the text is invisible (even
though it is in the document map). If I copy the blank
portion of the document where the text should be, and
paste it into Notepad, the text shows up in NotePad.

I tried rebooting. I tried updating Office. I tried
copying all of the text and pasting it into a new instance
of Word. This is very strange.

Has anyone seen this, or have any ideas.

Thanks.

-Mike Gage

 

[Mike Gage]

I found a way to make it work again. Apparently, when I
removed the bullets, Word removed the alignment for the
header level where the bullets were contained, as well as
the header level that was being inserted. By selecting
those header levels (3 and 4) in the bullets and numbering
dialog box, and clicking to increase, then decrease
indentation, the indentation levels were reset to 0", and
the text appeared again.

I hope no one else ever runs into anything like this.

-Mike Gage

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi Mike,

I found a way to make it work again. Apparently, when I
removed the bullets, Word removed the alignment for the
header level where the bullets were contained, as well as
the header level that was being inserted. By selecting
those header levels (3 and 4) in the bullets and numbering
dialog box, and clicking to increase, then decrease
indentation, the indentation levels were reset to 0", and
the text appeared again.

better yet to define your numbered heading styles according to the
following:

Word's numbering explained (by John McGhie)
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm
How to do it in VBA (by Dave Rado)
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Numbering/CureListNumbering.htm
How to do it manually:
http://www.ShaunaKelly.com/word/numbering/OutlineNumbering.html

Greetinx
..bob
...Word-MVP