Document Map Problem

Question

Using Mac Word 2011. 

My "Heading 1" levels aren't showing in the Document Map. But there's a twist: The line where the heading should display is blank. If I click on one of the blank lines, I'm taken to the correct place in the document. But I can't see the heading text in the Map.

Have tried closing the Nav pane, exiting Word, and re-entering, but problem persists. I've confirmed that the heading styles have been applied properly, as have the associated Outline levels. 

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

It does sound like a case of corruption. You'll find several suggested cures here:

Corrupt document

Try #2 first, making sure to not include the final ¶.

Use #1 if that doesn't work.

Thanks for the detailed report of your findings.

Answer 2

I tried both suggestions, with no joy. But --

When I returned to my normal user account and opened the file again, I found the chapter headings in the body of the doc (to which the heading 1 stile was applied) had disappeared. The document map still showed the "ghost" entries that linked to the right places in the document, but now the actual text of the heading was gone from both the document map and the body of the doc.

I'm not drinking, I swear.

I deleted the "empty" line with the heading 1 style from the document and re-entered it. This time the text appeared in both the doc and the document pane, except the incremental chapter number was one higher than it should have been.

After poking around a bit, I found that I had to delete and re-enter the preceding page break that separates one chapter from another -- then all was well: right chapter number, text visible in the doc and document page, as expected.

Sorry for all the confusion. I don't think I'll ever know why/how things went south, but at least I have a somewhat tedious process that seems to clear everything up.

Now I only wish I had a way to check the overall health of the document. I have this lingering suspicion that the root cause was a damaged document and I'm not sure adding the headings back will take care of that, if that's the case.

Regardless, many thanks to all who responded so quickly trying to help.

Answer 3

Try these 2 tests to help narrow the possibilities;

• Hold Shift while you launch Word to see if there's any difference
• Create a new user account & launch Word normally there

Reply with both results.

Answer 4

Thanks for the try -- no problems with fonts, nor did the disk permissions/restart process help. Problem still persists. 

One added piece of info -- if I switch to an outline view, all the "header 1" entries show as expected in the Outline view.

Very strange...

Answer 5

I'd first do the basics;

Confirm that Office is fully updated [14.2.4]

Run disk Utility to repair disk permissions

Restart your Mac

But I believe you'll find it to be a font conflict. Follow the procedure described here:

**Font Weeding.**