Word Bullets misbehaving

Question

I am trying to get the normal, round bullets to generate when I use the bullets. But when I click on the bullets for them, all I get is empty squares. I can get the bullet to show up with Option + 8 but that doesn't do any tabbing and they don't automatically generate. I've researched about maybe I have duplicate fonts and I need to remove them. I need a safe way to delete the duplicate fonts without deleting all of the fonts. The mac this is on is in our marketing department and the user needs all of his fonts. I tried going to all the duplicates and trying to automatically resolve them, but that looks like it just disabled them and didn't fix the problem. The normal, round bullets seem to be all that is affected as the other types of bullets work fine. Just a heads up, I know a good bit about Windows OS and very little about mac. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi Jon:

You may find you can resolve this issue by simply resetting the Bullets.

The Square Boxes indicate that the font the user has specified for their bullets available on their machine does not contain the specified bullet character.  This could be because the document they are using came from a different machine.

1. As a first try, in the Word menu bar, go to Format>Bullets and Numbering.
2. Click the Bulleted tab.
3. Click in each of the samples on the Bulleted tab, and watch the Reset button in the bottom left corner of the dialog.
4. If the Reset button enables, click it.

That resets the first 8 bullets formats in the document to the hard-coded defaults.

Now create a bulleted list and use Format>Bullets and Numbering to apply the Round Bullets sample.

That "reloads" the Bullets button.  The Bullets button simply applies whichever bullets template was most recently used on that workstation. By applying the round bullets, you reset it to apply those next time.

If the user does not like the round bullets it supplies, they are free to use Format>Bullets and Numbering>Customise to change them.  What they really should do is customise the List Bullet STYLE and use that to apply bullets whenever they want them.

Please note: this is NOT an IT issue.  This is a "user" issue.  The desperate desire of your user to avoid learning to use their tools of trade does NOT make this an IT support issue!  The user is at liberty to define their bullets the way they want them.  If they define them using an unavailable character in an unavailable font, they will indeed get square boxes.  Then again, square boxes (the character!) is one of the available bullet characters.

You may wish to open the Word help and leave them on the page that says "Text, Lists, and Bullets".  They need to know that stuff, it's part of operating Word.

Hope this helps

Answer 2

When managing your fonts, be sure to enable the newest version of the font in question. If you have two versions of font, choose to activate the version that has more glyphs. To see what verison a font is, in Font Book use the Preview menu and choose Show Font Info. Restart your Mac after using Font Book application.

Answer 3

Refer the link on how to deal with duplicate fonts. 

http://www.officeformachelp.com/office/font-management/#dupes