How can I safely put my "outline numbered" bullet styles back together again?

[barbara.c.hill]

I scrupulously followed Shauna Kelly's excellent instructions (http://
www.shaunakelly.com/word/bullets/controlbullets.html) to create
paragraph styles List Bullet 1 through List Bullet 5, including the
part about choosing the far upper right position in the list gallery
for the setup. Everything was fine for months. But no more.

I am using Word 2000. These styles are part of a workgroup template. I
am in charge of this template. I can get special dispensation from my
corporation to install Word 2003. I am working on the paperwork for
that now.

Last week I opened one of the documents that uses this template, only
to discover that every paragraph tagged with one of the List Bullet
styles was now sequentially numbered. (The documents are set to
automatically update their styles from the template. I am aware of the
dangers. But in this situation it is the right thing to do.) Another
document retained the phantom tabs and the appropriate indents but had
no bullet characters. A document opened in Word 2003 had bullet
characters, but every paragraph with a List Bullet style was indented
2 inches instead of 0, 0.25, 0.5, etc.

If I click one of these bulleted paragraphs and choose Format >
Bullets and Numbering, I see that the selected gallery position is now
the lower left instead of the upper left.

Clearly I need to repair the template.

Here are my questions.
1. Will these styles be more stable if I use Word 2003 instead of Word
2000 to define them?
2. Do I need to recreate the template from scratch, or can I start
with a version that has no autonumbered styles in it and rebuild those
styles?
3. I suspect that the cause of this corruption was a document based on
this template in which a colleague had clicked the bullet icon instead
of assigning a List Bullet style. (Well, really the cause was
Microsoft's code, but I have no control over that.) What do I need to
do with that document (or with its content) to make sure that it can
never again affect the List Bullet styles?
4. What do I need to do with the other documents that use this
template? Will it be enough to open them and save them with the
recreated template?

Thanks!
Barbara Hill

 

[Stefan Blom]

1. Assuming that you set up the styles as an outline-numbered list, the
version should make no difference.

2. Starting from scratch would be safer, especially if you suspect that the
template is damaged.

3. A document cannot corrupt its template; however, it can corrupt other
documents, if you have been using Save As to create new documents (instead
of creating them from the template).

To get rid of corruption, you can copy the contents except for the final
paragraph mark (Ctrl+A, Shift+Left arrow, Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+V) it into
a new, blank document. See also
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm.

4. Attach the template via Tools | Templates and Add-Ins. If the file name
and path is identical to the old template, you shouldn't have to do
anything.

For more information, see these articles:

What is the relationship between a Microsoft Word document and its template?
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/templaterelations/index.html

What happens when I attach a new template to my document? or How do I copy
content and settings from a template to a document?
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/attachtemplate/index.html