Permanent Solution for Heading Number Corruption (Black Boxes)

Topic

New Reply

I’m working with a newly updated template (.dot) and now new documents created with the template are experiencing the Heading Number black box issue (see attached).

The issue only pops up after saving and reopening the new document (doesn’t show up on initial creation).  Reapplying the style (using Apply Styles dialog [Ctrl+Shift+S]) fixes the issue, but once the document is reopened the corruption returns.

Setting the style to automatically update (via Developer > Document Template) fixes the issue, but there are occasions where changes are made to the headings in a particular document (e.g., adjusting the spacing before and/or after) that I don’t want to be undone upon reopening the document.

Also, the issue happens with EVERY new document created by double clicking on my updated template, so I imagine there must be some issue in the template that is causing the problem.

Anyone here have a “permanent” fix for this? I’ve gone through several threads on the interwebs, and none of the solutions have worked.

Reply | Quote

Replies

The five-line macro from a Word MVP here seems to have solved it for a lot of people:

MS Word heading styles are showing black boxes instead of numbers–how can I fix this?

Is that one of the potential solutions you already saw or tried?

1 user thanked author for this post.

WSRoobyDooby

Reply | Quote

That was NOT one of the solutions that I had found, and I am happy to report that it seems to have permanently solved the issue in the corrupted document.  Thank you for the help, b.

I do, however, wish there was a solution (something that could be done in the template) to keep it from happening in the first place…

1 user thanked author for this post.

b

Reply | Quote

Glad it worked.

It looks to be one of those things that’s happened for decades yet no one’s sure why.

Reply | Quote