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I have a Word 2016 template with a number of styles defined. When the template users create a document based on the template, there are a number of styles for them to use. They can add formatting to these styles (bold, etc.). When they add formatting, it basically adds a new style ("Heading 4 + Bold" for example) in the styles list. This means that when they next select the style (Heading 4), then it's formatted in the original style. This works great.
It works this way on all the styles in the document except three. These are bulleted styles. When they apply formatting to one of these three, it changes the style, not just the formatting for that piece of text. So if they indent the bullet style paragraph to match the indentation of the step above, it changes the indentation of every paragraph in the document with the same style. It is not designed to do this and it worked fine in previous revisions of Word. Now it's not working. I've tried restricting the style. I've tried using a multi-level list. I've rebuilt the styles in an entirely new template, hoping the conversion from Word 2013 to 2016 somehow corrupted the styles. Nothing seems to work.
Is there any way to stop Word from changing the base style when a user applies an indent to a single paragraph based on that style?
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
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For the affected styles, turn off the "Automatically update" option in the Modify Style dialog box. See screen shot below.
Modifying a numbered list will affect the number (or bullet) formatting for any paragraph styles that are associated with that list.
I believe you will have to share this file.
All it says under the Undo is "Bullets and Numbering." The style shows that it changed and when I apply the style elsewhere in the document, it applies with the changed style.
When you see the formatting changing, look at the Undo drop down; it will tell you what has just happened.
Note that if "Automatically update" turns out to be the culprit, that setting always applies to the underlying paragraph style. Automatic updates do not apply to other style types.
If you can't sort it out, share an example document that illustrates the issue. You can upload the file to (say) OneDrive or Dropbox, make it publicly accessible, and post a link in this thread.
For the affected styles, turn off the "Automatically update" option in the Modify Style dialog box. See screen shot below.
It's not checked.
It does the same thing when I use the Multilevel list style too.