In the course of investigating the problems that led to my post the other
day in m.p.w.a.e, I searched diligently for normal.dot. I've known the
techniques outlined in the article you posted the link to for years, yet I
was unable to find a copy of a file named normal.dot. It wasn't until I
opened a blank document and saved it as normal.dot in the user template
location that I was able to make changes to the default template.
Y'all keep pointing folks to the article that tells them the training wheels
techniques for finding a file but the fact of the matter is that in some
cases, it just ain't there. I'd recommend a little investigation... dig up a
freshly installed instance of Windows 2000, install Word 2002 and find
normal.dot. I think Microsoft made some changes to the way it creates a new,
blank document beginning with Word 2002. I think the stuff that had been
normally included in normal.dot has been offloaded to a .dll file someplace
that Word uses to source a new blank document. If at some point, the user
creates a normal.dot file and places it in the user template directory (or
perhaps uses those techniques outlined in
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CustomizeNormalTemplate.htm in which
case Word itself might generate a normal.dot file... I don't know if that's
the case or not. Haven't got the bandwidth right now to investigate.), Word
then uses that file as the basis for new blank documents.
Obviously, Word has always had the ability to function with no normal.dot
file... we advise people to delete it all the time and Word (in the past)
merrily generates a new one. Is it so strange to conceive that Microsoft in
its wisdom may have said "Hey... we really don't need to create a normal.dot
file... the default settings are already stored in such-and-such.dll... why
do we need to bother creating a normal.dot file? We can create one on the
fly if the user modifies one of the default settings."
I don't want to sound contentious but I consider myself to be an
expert-level Word user and a highly advanced Windows user (don't have the
network training to be an expert Windows user) and if anyone can find a
missing normal.dot, I can.
I do have a theory on the characters mysteriously getting included in the
default template... is it possible that somehow those "Default" buttons that
are the new recommended method for modifying normal.dot actually create a
normal.dot file on the fly with the contents (or partial contents) of the
current document?
Best regards
Mike
