I need to get the whole office seeing our .dot templates when the use the "new" command in Word. I believe this is a case of going to options and browsing to the relevant folder for "workgroup templates". I've tried this several times now in a version of Normal.dot. But it doesn't bring the templates up. Also there seem to be several copies of Normal.dot around the place and I don't know how to tell if I am making the changes in the right place. Please help,

Hi Liz,
Thanks for the post, in answer to your question, I have had this problem myself, the way I got round it in a large office was to create the template, locate it on the server, and then instruct everyone as to where to find it, the action to look for it is from the File>New menu operation, is to use the "New>From Existing Document" option in the side bar, and then navigate to your centralised folder location, if all your .dot templates are located in one place this should eliminate the duplications and discrepancies problem, I hope this has helped, if so please click the Resolved link, best regards Pete

Hello Pete

Thanks. In the past this seemed easier: all staff had to do was click New and they found a menu of our own templates ready to use, with no browsing required at all.
All we (managers) had to do was put them in the folder that everyone's "workgroup templates" was pointing to.

What I was hoping for was a way of changing Normal.dot globally so that everyone in the office would be pointed to the right location for "workgroup templates", and for the "new" action to offer them a menus of whatever we (managers) had put in there. I thought we were told about a way of doing this when we had Word training here (but have mislaid my notes!)

It seems to me that most "upgrades" include a raft of DOWNGRADE features too, very frustrating.

Liz

Hi Liz, another option would be to;
Create your Normal.dot as a global template to be shared over your network, as I said before it should be placed in a folder on the network server to which all users have file read access. Each user's network login file should be set to copy the file to the user's personal startup folder when the user logs onto the network if the network version is newer than the user's version. That way you can update the template without everyone having to be off from Word when you do it. (The personal startup folder can be on a network drive or a local drive; my preference is to use a local drive.)

If you can't work with the login scripts or aren't worried about updating the template you will probably want to use shortcuts to it in each user's Word Startup folder. That way, any changes will automatically update everyone's Word. If it is your own and not shared you can either put it in your Startup folder or keep it elsewhere and use the shortcut to load it into Word.

Note that since Word 2000, Word has recognised two startup folders to hold global templates. The first is the folder designated as the Word startup folder under

Tools>Options>File Locations (tab).

The second is the Office Startup folder. Its location will vary depending on both the Operating System and the version of Word (Office) being used. I know the Word Startup folder can be different for each user but the Office startup folder will always be in the Programs folder rather than in the user profile, so for ease of use you could discard this option.

So in some sort of re-cap, create your global template, place it in a folder that everyone can see, and then on each of your your user's computers use the Tool>Options>File Locations options to create a file to open when looking for New.
I hope that works a bit better, regards Pete