Hi, Margaret, (et al),

Thanks for the suggestions. I read about setting up numbered lists, and
while it's interesting, it doesn't seem that applicable. Maybe I need to
described what I am trying to do. I get a document for review from
department A, and once I make updates/corrections, it get's incorporated in a
larger document by department B. We had 2 types of problems, the input from A
was all over the map in terms of formatting, and even after I cleaned it up,
B would end up changing it when they added it to the larger document because
their format definitions would override mine. It seemed the way to solve this
was to create a unique set of styles for A to use thus standardizing their
input to me, and making it "change-resistant" for B since I used unique names
for my custom styles. To make this work, it must be easy for A to use these
style while creating the original document for me. It seems that A can get
these styles into their document either by pasting the example
paragraphs/tables from my master document, or by importing these from a
template (dot) file that I provide using Format Theme Style Gallery to
select the template containing my custom styles. The problem is that bulleted
and numbered lists get changed. These are *simple* formats that have either
special alignments/indenting and tabs and/or spacing charcters [")" vs. "."]
after the list item numbers. What I see is:

- bullet lists lose the bullet character
- bullet lists changed to numbered lists
- numbered lists with formatting change, sometime even within the same list

I tried re-applying the custom style to the "corrupted" items, but this does
not work. When I look at my styles with Format/Styles, the definitions still
look "right", but when I look at them on the drop-down style list on the
formatting toolbar, they display as described in the list above. When I open
Format Tools Bullets and Numbering with the cursor on one of the
corrupted items, the gallery position is not what I had set when I defined
the style, and I can correct the problem by re-setting the style to B&N
gallery position I originally defined for it. These seems to be the root of
the problem (or at least the symptom), i.e., the B&N gallery position for my
custom style gets changed by Word when I copy the style.

I have not tried your suggestion about using copying 3 times in Tools
Templates and Add-ins Organizer, which seems really cumbersome to expect
department A to follow it. I have a question about this:

For bullet and numbered styles, even if the style names match, you will generally
have to Ctrl-Q to reset to style.

Where/when do I do the Ctrl-Q? It does not seem make any difference if I do
this while I highlight one of the corrupted items.

Thanks/Paul