When I close my document and re-open it, various styles (which are not
related or based on each other) have bullets.

Pressing backspace key to remove bullet points from a line of text acts as
if I am changing the style, eg the following is shown in Styles sidebar:
"Table Text + Left -0.1cm".

I right-click on the original style in the sidebar, and select "Modify
Style"; the style definition does not mention or show bullets, however when I
select the styled text in the document, it claims to be in that style (thus
re-applying the style to selected text has no effect).

I have found this happens on re-opening the document after inserting a Table
of Contents, section breaks (next page), and changing the header. I'm not
sure which of these causes the bulleting.

This has happened to two documents, based on different templates. Both
documents were long (50 pages +). Templates were well set up and frequently
used, no styles were set to automatically update. In the most recent
document, nothing was copied/pasted from other documents, it was all written
into the document using the defined styles.

This problem happened once on my computer, once on another machine (both
Word 2003).

Hi ?B?U2ltb25l?=,

When I close my document and re-open it, various styles (which are not
related or based on each other) have bullets.

1. Tools/Templates and Addins: are styles set to automatically update from the
template?

2. Are these built-in styles, or ones you've created?

I right-click on the original style in the sidebar, and select "Modify
Style"; the style definition does not mention or show bullets, however when I
select the styled text in the document, it claims to be in that style (thus
re-applying the style to selected text has no effect).

This is an indication that the bullets have been applied as "direct formatting".
If you select such a paragraph and press Ctrl+Q, does the bullet go away?

If you open the Reveal Formatting task pane, can you glean any more information
about where the bullets are coming from?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

Thanks for your help - the Ctrl+Q trick seems to work. I'd still love to
know what caused it to happen though! \\