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A bug that I have long lived with in Word, but that I'm growing increasingly frustrated with, is the following behaviour:

  • copy some unformatted text, e.g. from Notepad
  • put cursor in a new line of a bulleted list, in a Word document
  • Paste => indentation of the current bullet changes slightly from that of the previous bullets

Sometimes playing with the paste options MergeStyles, MergeFormatting, PlainText or DestinationStyle fixes this. However, when the above problem occurs, there is usually no pasteOptions floating button, which is probably related to why the problem appears in the first place.

I know of Shauna Kelly's excellent resource on Word styles, and her advice on creating lists for each level of a bulleted list; however, beyond implementing that, I wonder whether there is a way to simply be able to paste unformatted text into a bulleted list, and have this NOT change whatever the current indentation of that list is.

Or at least whether this bug is fixed in Word 2019 (am using 2016).

Thanks for any help.

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  • I never noticed any such happening in Word 2019 or previous versions. Here is an image of before and after paste from notepad the text "notepad", and the margins haven't moved at all. Perhaps I misunderstood the problem. Please post a minimal document that shows this behavior.
    – harrymc
    Aug 19, 2019 at 9:31
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    As I said, this behaviour does not happen at all times. I was not able to isolate the conditions in which it does happen. Here is a minimal document where this happens (at least on my PC, with my installation of Word 2016).
    – z8080
    Aug 20, 2019 at 10:48

2 Answers 2

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This happens to me all the time and is SO annoying. My solution is to open a blank MS Word document and paste it in there first, then paste it from there into my bullet list and it doesn't get screwed up. Who knows what's happening, it's pure unformatted text it should not be messing up the document format.

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    God bless you. I'd mark your answer with a green tick if I could.
    – ScumCoder
    Aug 11, 2020 at 21:10
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I have tried pasting text into your document several times at different times, and the paragraph margins never moved at all.

Since I'm on Office 2019, this might answer your question, meaning that after upgrading to Word 2019 the problem will disappear.

But this might also be caused by some add-in to Word in your setup. To check this possibility, start Word with the command winword /safe.

In Safe mode, Word will load without any add-ins or extensions, and without toolbar or command bar customizations. Any recovered documents that would normally be opened automatically will not open. Auto-Correct and various other features won’t work, and preferences can’t be saved.

If the problem doesn't happen in Safe mode, you could disable add-ins selectively until you find the cause of the problem.

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  • Thanks a lot Harry for your help, this is really useful. I am surprised that the problem did not occur for you in that document. I strongly suspect it has to do either with document settings or with Word version (i.e. a 2016 bug), rather than with an add-on, which I don't recall installing. In either case, opening the doc in Safe Mode produces the message "The selection is locked", so for some reason I cannot test that hypothesis. I guess I will try to upgrade to 2019. Thanks again, I appreciate it.
    – z8080
    Aug 20, 2019 at 13:25

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