Format Error - headers inserting into the document automatically in the wrong places

Question

Hi

I have a word document that I edit in both word 2007 and word 2010 and somehow Word adds additional headers (which you can see in the outline view) to the document without user consent. That is header in the wrong place.

This is only happening to one of my documents and thought it was a word virus. Are there any tricks to get rid of this.

Thanks

Answer 1

I tried 2 solutions. Firstly I tried changing the style of the affected paragraphs to Normal style (Home Tab, Styles Section). This appeared to work as this was removing the non-heading text from the TOC. However when I had worked with this file in Word 2007 then back to Word 2010 the problem came back.

That would seem to suggest either that one of the Word installations is faulty or that the document has some form of corruption.

I suggest repairing both Office installation (via Programs & Features > Microsoft Office > Change in the Windows Control Panel).

As for the possible document corruption, documents can often be 'repaired' by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template, closing the old document and saving the new one over it. Similarly, corrupt tables can often be 'repaired' by converting the tables to text and back again or by saving the document in RTF format, closing the document then re-opening it and re-saving in the doc(x) format.

Answer 2

No I checked that the "Automatically update document styles" on both the Office 2007 and Office 2010 computers and this box was unticked.

Answer 3

It is possible that this document is automatically updating the styles when you open it and this is importing a dodgy style from its attached template on one of your machines.

Go to the Developer Tab and click the Document Template button. Is the "Automatically update document styles" checkbox ticked?