Text style turns to bullets when copied/pasted - Word 2003

[Bev]

I have two documents. Both use the same templates. Both were created from
blank pages, not legacy documents. I copied some paragraphs and a table from
one document to paste into the other. The table text pasted into the target
document had suddenly turned to bullets.

When I applied the proper text style to undo the bullets, it seemed as if
all the styles were suddenly toggling back and forth between being bullets
and plain.

So, I backed out the pasted material. Then, I pasted each paragraph one at
a time. When I did so, no mystery bullets appeared in the table text.

Why would Word insist that my table text had to become bullets when I pasted
a page of material but not when I pasted each paragraph individually?

 

[Stefan Blom]

When you pasted the whole document, you may have brought along a style whose
equivalent in the target document is formatted as bold.

Alternatively, since it happened within in a table, the table formatting
could be damaged somehow.