Microsoft Word troubleshooting and how-to guides
When you use the Compare Documents feature in Word, you may notice that changes involving spaces, tabs, or blank lines are not marked. Word treats these whitespace-only differences as non-substantive and hides them by default. This behavior can cause reviewers to miss formatting or structural edits that rely on consistent spacing. This article explains why … Read more
Exporting a Word document that contains tracked changes to Markdown while preserving author names is a common task for writers and developers who collaborate in Word but finalize content in Markdown-based systems like GitHub or static site generators. By default, Word does not include a built-in export to Markdown that carries revision author information. This … Read more
You set the Show Markup filter in Word to show only Comments or Formatting changes, but after closing and reopening the document, the filter reverts to showing all markup. This behavior is not a bug. Word is designed to reset the Show Markup filter to its default state each time you open a document in … Read more
When collaborating on a document in Word, you may want to allow only certain people to reply to or resolve comment threads while others can only read or add new comments. By default, any reviewer with edit access can reply to any comment thread. This can lead to confusion when multiple people respond to the … Read more
The reviewing pane in Word closes by itself after you make certain edits such as accepting a tracked change, inserting a comment, or switching between documents. This behavior is not a random glitch. It happens because Word is designed to hide the pane when it detects that the current view no longer contains tracked changes … Read more
When you insert a standard table of contents in Word, every heading level uses the same tab leader, typically a series of dots. You may want a solid line for Chapter titles, a dotted line for subheadings, or no leader at all for minor headings. Word does not offer a built-in dialog to assign different … Read more
When you insert a table of contents in Word, heading levels below a certain number may not appear. For example, Heading 3, Heading 4, or Heading 5 entries can be missing from the TOC even though the headings exist in the document. This happens because the TOC style is set to show only a limited … Read more
Legal professionals often need to organize citations by authority type such as cases, statutes, regulations, and secondary sources. Manually sorting and formatting these citations wastes time and risks errors. Word provides built-in tools to create authority tables that automatically categorize and format citations. This article explains how to set up and use Word’s Table of … Read more
You insert a new figure or table in a Word document, add a caption with a number, and then update the table of contents expecting to see the new caption. Instead, the TOC either shows the old numbers or omits the new entry entirely. This problem occurs because Word’s TOC and caption fields rely on … Read more
You have a Word document with many index entries marked, and now you need a glossary that lists those terms with their definitions or explanations. Manually copying each index entry into a separate table is time-consuming and error-prone. Word does not have a built-in command to convert index entries into a glossary, but you can … Read more