My paragraphs turned into chapters

I have a document with fairly simple structure in which I use a lot of footnotes. The footnotes are configured to start numbering from 1 with each new chapter, which they used to do (I start my chapters with a Heading One). Now, LO seems to think that every paragraph is a chapter, and my footnote numbers restart with each paragraph. If I insert a Table of Contents, I appear to get an entry for each paragraph.

I don’t see what could have brought this on, or how to reverse it.

Using 6.0.7.3 on MacOS

Check that your paragraphs were inadvertently styled as Heading 1. If this is not the case, open the style and go to Outline & Numbering tab. The Outline level may have been set to Level 1 instead of Body Text. Finally, check Default Style paragraph style Outline & Numbering tab. It is the ancestor of all styles and anything you change in it cascades down to all others.

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I’m having almost the exact same problem that every paragraph is included in the table of contents (no footnotes in my document). I triple-checked the paragraph styles as suggested above but with every index update, LO includes all paragraphs in the TOC. This is happening on both LO V. 6.2.2.2 (Ubuntu Linux) and V. 6.1.5 (macOS).

As an improvement on my answer, start with Default Style before Heading n, so that you don’t break the inheritance cascade.

Fixing the outline level solved most of the trouble. I used sledgehammer techniques to deal with the rest (eg: change paragraph type to Quotation and then back to Body Text).

gtomorrow: are you still stuck?

Styling back-and-forth is one of the silently shared tricks to get things tidy. Should be promoted more publicly.

@tcalderw , your “sledgehammer” technique seems to be the only way to resolve the problem! Thank you!