Windows XP normal.dot wrong, has lines on can't get rid of!

[llblawyer]

Hi, Help please I'm going around in circles. Somehow I appear to have altered by normal.dot for the word document in microsoft office. I can't reinstall office as i don't have the original anymore. I cannot get a blank page it appears as lined paper and all my work that i've done appears with background lines on it. I can find my normal.dot and that has these lines on but i can't find a way of getting rid of them or reinstating it as it was before!!! Please help in the middle of a university dissertation and can't deal with it like this. Don't know what i've done or how and how to just go back to getting a blank page.

Thanks

 

[Ian]

I'm not sure if this will work, but try renaming the normal.dot file to something like normal.old and then load up Word, it should just recreate the default normal.dot

 

[llblawyer]

Help please - cannot get a blank word document - atall!

Hi, thanks for the help but that's not working unless i'm not getting it. All my documents have changed, all my word documents now have lines on them. When i do a print preview it doesn't show them but all my word documents even new ones when i create them come up as lined paper and i don't know how i've done it.

When i look at my normal it shows it with the lines aswell and they are not ones i can delete, i can't find a setting to get rid of them. Tried renaming it old but just stays the same but changes name! This is really frustrating I need it to just go back to normal blank documents and i can't figure out any way to get them back.

Help!!

 

[Ian]

Can you post a screenshot here so I can see? I think it must just be your view settings need changing, as it doesn't sound like a physical element on the page.

 

[llblawyer]

I feel like a bit of an idiot, i've finally sorted it out cause like you said it didn't seem right. I thought i'd checked all my settings before posting question but found that someone had put gridlines on the page and checked it as a default so all the documents had them on. Looks like that was the problem and hopefully it's cleared now. Sorry to have wasted your time. I've shouted loudly at the family!! Thanks again.