Keyboard shortcuts reassign themselves

So now I’m really lost.

Do we have a step-by-step that we can follow to reliably reproduce the problem?

Is there a work-around that works every time?

You may be on to something, Daniel. But, sadly, I've never even turned on "start dictation"! (I do use text-to-speech, though, and it has a system-wide keyboard shortcut -- cmd-] -- which seems unaffected.)

I notice that in system prefs, although dictation is turned off and the shortcut is set at "off," Word's menu shows "Start Dictation" with the "fn fn" shortcut. I also notice that when I go into Word's Customize, "Start Dictation" does not show up in the customizable menu, although when I pull down the "real" Edit menu at the very top, it's the only thing that isn't greyed out.

By the way, in Customize or the make-keyboard-shortcut options in Styles, the cmd-c/v/p are all perfectly intact and properly assigned. Reassigning them makes no difference. (I tried that yesterday!)

Dictation is turned off in System Preferences. I wonder how "Dictation" got into the menu in the 1st place.

About the Format menu. I don't remember if I did that because of frustration with the ribbon or if it was always there. 

I've noticed that the "Format" (copy format function) command is sometimes in the Edit and sometimes in Format menu. 

Thanks for the idea. I'm going to try to get rid of dictation in Word.

Jim

First of all, let me say that I don't have the latest incarnations of OS X and that I'm still using Snow Leopard. Thus, the following is just speculation.

It seems to me that the guilty party here is the addition of "Start Dictation." Since this command is system-wide, OS X adds it at the end of every application's Edit menu. However, it is not prepared to find customized menus. It may work initially, being properly added as the last choice in the Edit list of options. But at some point, it picks up the default number of choices from some other place and this results in a conflict in the number of available choices. OS X becomes out of synch and starts re-counting menu items from the top, adding a separator and the extra "Start Dictation" command. Then Word takes over and adds the shortcuts to the menu options in the order it saw them originally.

The solution would then be to disable dictation at the "Dictation & Speech" panel in System Preferences.

For those who need this command, you could try moving any customizations from the Edit menu to another place, like a new toolbar or a new "Edit 2" menu.  I don't think moving them to the bottom or top of the Edit list would work.

To Dr_JVb: I do see an extra Format menu in your screenshot.

Jim, my first instincts were template corruption-- is that where the menu keystrokes are kept?

What's amazing to me is that in all the years and all the versions of Word I've used, I've never seen a re-assignment of keystrokes before!  The re-assignment is consistent, too.  They move down one menu item.  And why it resets itself after a quit and restart is baffling, too.

Something in Word 2011 seems to make it more fragile--I've had more bizarre behavior and more crashes with it than with all other programs before on the Mac combined!  And that's over three decades.

The only regularly occurring crashes with Word 2008 were replicably-related to pasting graphs or charts into the program from Excel!  Fortunately, no keystrokes were reassigned.   But I learned to be compulsive about saving, wearing out the Command-S key combo!  :-)