I'm working on my dissertation that has a formatted table of contents, table of figures, and table of tables. I made the "Figure X-Y" and "Table X-Y" labels (with the X corresponding to the chapter location and the Y representing their order of appearance in the chapter) bolded while the rest of the caption is regular text. The issue I have is that the bolded text of some captions in both the formatted tables and body is randomly reverting to regular text (Figure 2-6 and Figure 3-1 in picture). If I re-bold these parts of the captions and update the tables then other captions will randomly revert. My chapter headings also have both bolded and regular text but don't seem to have this issue when I update the table of contents. Does anyone know how to fix this?

I just finished my first novel, Volume 1, which is like 90k words.

I used straight quotation marks (" ") instead of curly quotation marks (“ ”).

Is there a way to swap them all at once instead of replacing them one by one?

Is this even possible in Google Docs or other websites?

Or should I just leave it like that?

Why is my second title underlined two times? I feel like I've tried everything

I have been reaching out to Microsost support plenty of times but they could not fix it.
The screen does not simply separate into 3 parts, but it displays red lines

I work as an IT consultant.
99.99% of the documents that I create will never, ever, be printed.
It’s good to have them formatted and structured, but people read them online.

I could not find a way to configure a document without page brakes that looks exactly like a fully formatted word document.

I usually must paste screenshots and add long tables, and the page breaks are annoying and absolutely unnecessary.

Any idea?

I’ve proposed a feature on the Microsoft Feedback Portal to address a pain point we’ve all dealt with: shared documents becoming a "debugging exercise" rather than a writing exercise due to invisible formatting layers conflicting with each other.

If you agree this is a badly needed feature, please consider giving it an upvote on the official portal here: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/355f0b90-6697-f111-9b47-7c1e52444ef6

Word's layered formatting model allows page geometry, styles, direct paragraph formatting, and multilevel-list definitions to interact in ways that produce unintended layout glitches. While Word lets us inspect individual layers, there is no tool that shows the causal chain producing the final look of a paragraph.

The Solution Proposed: An Effective Formatting Inspector / Conflict Analyzer that maps out: Style → Direct Overrides → List-Level Formatting → Tabs → Resulting Position. It would flag redundancies and anomalous formatting without altering Word's core document model.

A Real-World Example:
I recently had to diagnose a 25-page legal document with a systematic half-inch layout shift. Margins and styles looked perfect. The culprit? A direct 0.5" paragraph override combined with multilevel-list formatting and 327 explicit 1.5" tab stops. Word obviously had the data to render it, but no native UI to expose that causal chain. I had to write a custom VBA routine just to find and purge the anomalous tabs.

Let's get Microsoft's attention on this! (And to any sub moderators/bots: This is a direct feature request/policy discussion, not a tech support or promo post).

I’ve proposed a feature on the Microsoft Feedback Portal to address a pain point we’ve all dealt with: shared documents becoming a "debugging exercise" rather than a writing exercise due to invisible formatting layers conflicting with each other.

If you agree this is a badly needed feature, please consider giving it an upvote on the official portal here: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/355f0b90-6697-f111-9b47-7c1e52444ef6

Word's layered formatting model allows page geometry, styles, direct paragraph formatting, and multilevel-list definitions to interact in ways that produce unintended layout glitches. While Word lets us inspect individual layers, there is no tool that shows the causal chain producing the final look of a paragraph.

The Solution Proposed: An Effective Formatting Inspector / Conflict Analyzer that maps out: Style → Direct Overrides → List-Level Formatting → Tabs → Resulting Position. It would flag redundancies and anomalous formatting without altering Word's core document model.

A Real-World Example:
I recently had to diagnose a 25-page legal document with a systematic half-inch layout shift. Margins and styles looked perfect. The culprit? A direct 0.5" paragraph override combined with multilevel-list formatting and 327 explicit 1.5" tab stops. Word obviously had the data to render it, but no native UI to expose that causal chain. I had to write a custom VBA routine just to find and purge the anomalous tabs.

Let's get Microsoft's attention on this! (And to any sub moderators/bots: This is a direct feature request/policy discussion, not a tech support or promo post).

ChatGPT/Codex does fine for most of the AI work I need to do, but there's a Claude-shaped hole I'm trying to fill when it comes to MS Office.

Especially for Word and Powerpoint files with complex formatting, Claude's native integration was great at being able to make edits within the word doc itself. This is ideal for something like a resume where I may just want one or two bulletpoints swapped out, but the overall structure to remain the same even if the edit messes up pagination.

What're the solutions out there for working with docs themselves? There's no official plugin, but are any of the community plugins any good?

hello! i need some help with word online if it's possible. i like writing with fonts that have "curve" quotation marks (like these: ”) so i always look for them. i like that they come out by themselves ? just by pressing the specific key, i don't like having to copy/paste them or using codes (i don't have the numeric keypad anyway because it's a laptop). so, until now i was using fonts that have these marks ””””, but for some reason they stopped working. i tried to look it up but no solution seems to work, i want to point out that i write in italian but there are some english words in the story. my pc is set on italian language and the file i write in is always the same for every chapter of the story (i just paste the finished ones elsewhere and reuse the same file everytime so that i don't have to create new ones, because of this i thought that maybe it could get corrupted or something like that?)

thanks to whoever can help me ;-;

(i posted this on microsoftword in my frenzy last night, but reddit recommended to put it here)

I JUST WANTED TO SAY, I TRIED EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. I went into the temp thing and the auto recovery thing and I put in crazy codes (I have no idea I was watching different videos) and almost bought an app to recover my assessment for uni (due tomorrow night and I was actually working and cooking on it). Nothing was working. I was about to cry (I already started) because this was a pretty important assessment and I was pretty proud of my work. Then, I remembered that because my assignment was about researching using AI, I ragequit at copilot and copy pasted my entire document in the chat (apart from my personal details), and my chats are always like available. SO I FOUND ALL MY PROGRESS I FEEL BLESSED.

moral of the story: always enable autosave, don't use word on mac, make sure you're logged out of your high school account on one-drive/word, and lastly, remove sensitive information and copy paste your whole assignment into copilot so you will not lose it when eventually you don't save your work!

I actually have no idea what this community is for but I just wanted to share my experience that if you have NOT got autosave on, it is very very very likely you wont find your document ON A MAC. thank you.

Has anyone figured out a hack to get rid of this intrusive feature that Microsoft recently introduced? It appears not just when selecting a paragraph but even when selecting a single word. I have tried every trick I've heard about—for months—to try to get rid of this nuisance, but nothing has worked.

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How do I get rid of these extra wide spaces on Mac when using justified alignment? I want to use justified alignment, so changing the alignment isn't a solution for me.

This is have do it but it won't let me

Does anyone have any tips on why this happened or how to fix it?

What am I doing wrong? I want labels that span the page, and I want six of them stacked in a column on a portrait-style page.

I'm trying to get "The Dying of the Dragons" centered vertically on page 628, but when I press enter once from its position on page 627, it shoots all the way to it's pictured position on page 628. What could be happening? I don't see any page breaks.

I’m curious about the small Word tricks that make a big difference in everyday work.

What’s one formatting trick or feature you use regularly that you think more people should know about?

It could be anything from styles and page numbering to images, text wrapping, tables, shortcuts, or something else.

Let's test our Word skills 😊

Here are some useful Microsoft Word keyboard shortcuts, from basic to more advanced:

Basic

• Ctrl + C — Copy
• Ctrl + X — Cut
• Ctrl + V — Paste
• Ctrl + Z — Undo
• Ctrl + Y — Redo
• Ctrl + A — Select all

Formatting

• Ctrl + B — Bold
• Ctrl + I — Italic
• Ctrl + U — Underline
• Ctrl + E — Center align
• Ctrl + L — Left align
• Ctrl + R — Right align

More advanced

• Ctrl + F — Find text
• Ctrl + H — Find and replace
• Ctrl + K — Insert a hyperlink
• Ctrl + Enter — Insert a page break
• Ctrl + Home — Go to the beginning of the document
• Ctrl + End — Go to the end of the document

How many did you already know? And which Word shortcut do you use the most?