old 2003 template to new location?

[grammatim]

It's been three months, but I FINALLY have an actual new PC, with my
old files copied onto a new (partitioned) drive -- but Vista was not
installed over XP, so that everything simply shows up in the new
system.

I therefore now have Word2003 with a pristine normal.dot. I was able
to find an old normal.dot in my old "Applications & Data" folder that
has a suitable "Last Modified" date, but I can't discover where to put
it within Vista so that Word2003 can find it. (Vista also has
Office2007 on it,) I found a folder called Templates, but that didn't
do it.

 

[Jay Freedman]

I'm not at my Vista machine at the moment, so I'm working from memory
(notoriously dangerous!). In Windows Explorer (a.k.a. "Computer"), enter the
location
%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates
in the box at the top left and press Enter, which should get you to an
otherwise hidden folder at C:\Users\<profile
name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates. That's the equivalent of the
Templates folder in XP.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You could open Word 2003, make a small change that would affect Normal.dot,
and then search for the copy of Normal.dot that was just created; copy your
old Normal.dot over that, and Bob's your uncle.

 

[grammatim]

No -- I no longer have Word2003 on a pre-Vista drive; when 2003
installed, it made its own new normal.dot inside Vista (and didn't
affect the old one). So any New document opens with the new,
characterless template.

 

[grammatim]

It worked!!!

To the extent necessary: my keyboard shortcuts are available again. (I
wonder whether they'll leak into Word2007; the normal.dotx is in the
same folder.)

But my quirky toolbars did not reappear. Is their customization stored
somewhere else that I can retrieve?

 

[Jay Freedman]

If you made your 2003 toolbars by customizing the built-in toolbars, they
won't appear in 2007. If they were created _de novo_ as custom toolbars in
2003, they should appear in an Add-Ins tab on the ribbon (which shows up
only if there are custom toolbars to display). Graham covers all this in
http://www.gmayor.com/Toolbars_in_word_2007.htm.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

My point is that if you locate the new, characterless one, you can then copy
your old one over it.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

No -- I no longer have Word2003 on a pre-Vista drive; when 2003
installed, it made its own new normal.dot inside Vista (and didn't
affect the old one). So any New document opens with the new,
characterless template.

 

[grammatim]

No, I want my customized toolbars to appear in my new copy of
Word2003.

I have no hope of getting my customized QAT back, as I don't have the
slightest idea what happened to the hard drive that was in what turned
out to be the interim computer. (My computer guy claimed he had
transferred all the files, but in fact he hadn't; I had to copy them
from my backup drive that I put them on before I handed over the
computer. So only in the unlikely event that Word2007 info is
somewhere in the Documents folder can I retrieve _that_ set of
settings.)

 

[grammatim]

And Jay told me where to find it ... but why would one want to go
through making a little change in the one one was getting rid of?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

To make it show up. The (perhaps unconfirmed) conventional wisdom is that,
in recent versions of Word, Normal.dot doesn't exist as an actual file (as
opposed to internal hard-wired defaults) until you customize it.

But you should also be able to get the template path from the File Locations
tab of Tools | Options.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

And Jay told me where to find it ... but why would one want to go
through making a little change in the one one was getting rid of?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Ah, my misreading.

Customized toolbars in Word 2003 are stored in templates. That probably is
Normal.dot, but could be some other template -- it depends on whether you
changed the "Save in" box when you created the toolbar. If you can find the
right template, then (a) if it's Normal.dot, put it in the Templates folder or
(b) if it's some other template, put it in the Startup folder.

 

[grammatim]

Ok, there was another normal.dot in the same place with a slightly
earlier modification date (and a slightly different name); can the
keyboard shortcuts have been in one template and the toolbar
customizations in another?

The Windows Startup folder, or some Office-specific Startup folder?

 

[Graham Mayor]

Word will only use normal.dot (or for 2007 normal.dotm) as its default
template? The normal template must be located in the User templates folder.
If there is no normal template in that location, Word will create a new one.
You can replace this with a pre-configured normal template created from an
earlier installation, but you can't rename any old template to normal.dot(m)
and expect it to work correctly.

To avoid (your) confusion don't use files with similar names to the normal
template as add-ins.

The 2007 QAT is saved as a file Word.qat in the user file area of Windows
i.e.
C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\OFFICE
in Vista it is at
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\

So if you still have that file your 2007 QAT can be recovered. It's settings
are, however irrelevant to Word 2003, if that is what you meant.

2003 Toolbars can be stored in the normal template, in add-ins in document
templates and in documents. By default they would be stored in the normal
template.

2007 doesn't use toolbars apart from the QAT'

If you want to run both 2003 and 2007 on the same PC, I would ensure that
they use different user template and start-up folders. You can configure the
locations from tools > options > file locations (2003) or Word Options

Advanced > File locations.

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>

 

[Jay Freedman]

Ok, there was another normal.dot in the same place with a slightly
earlier modification date (and a slightly different name); can the
keyboard shortcuts have been in one template and the toolbar
customizations in another?

It's possible -- each of those customizations can be independently stored in any
template -- but not very probable. The only way to find out is to try it. That
would be easiest to test by basing a new document on the template in question,
and seeing whether the customized toolbar appears.

The Windows Startup folder, or some Office-specific Startup folder?

Specifically the Word startup folder, %appdata%\Microsoft\Word\Startup by
default, but that's configurable in Word Options > Advanced > File Locations.
(In a parallel response, Graham suggests configuring 2003 and 2007 to use
different folders for their Startup locations. That's good advice, although I
don't follow it myself.)

 

[grammatim]

How do I base a new document on a particular template? Word opens with
a blank document ready to go, and Ctrl-N doesn't offer a choice.
(Whereas, Ctrl-N in FrameMaker opens the dialog for choosing the
template, page orientation, etc.)

I'm afraid Graham's reply was incomprehensible! He's programmer-
oriented, I'm user-oriented. (For instance, I don't know what he means
by "add-in" -- I thought those are the annoying things that Adobe
sticks on the Ribbon that mess up Word.) As I said, I have no access
to the hard drive I used in September that had my 2007 customization,
so I have to redo the whole month's fiddling with the QAT.

--
And I can't do _any_ of this now, thanks to Vista idiocies!! (Where do
I go to complain about Vista idiocies?) This time my computer guy
didn't take the time to install Office2007 (in September he gave me
what turned out to be the loaner fully loaded), so I put off entering
the Product Key (figuring it would take a while). What happened was
that as soon as I did so, at the end of the day, it demanded that I go
get Updates. So I went got Updates -- 58 of them, nearly 6 Gb -- and
left it to download them while I watched House and yesterday's Boston
Legal and SVU. And when I got back to the computer, it turned out it
had gone to sleep after 1 hour with 1/3 of the downloads downloaded.
So I found under Energy Saver a place to tell it to Never go to sleep
and left it to finish downloading overnight. Eight hours later, I
found it asleep again, with less than half the downloads Installed!!!!
So now it's been Installing again for an hour, but probably not with
total efficiency, as I've been doing my email and newsgroups. The
Vista tachometer at the side of the desktop often has the pointer at
100% (1.5 Gb RAM), so having typed this useless complaint, I suppose I
should turn off the internets and go read a book or something while it
finishes.

 

[Graham Mayor]

How do I base a new document on a particular template? Word opens with
a blank document ready to go, and Ctrl-N doesn't offer a choice.
(Whereas, Ctrl-N in FrameMaker opens the dialog for choosing the
template, page orientation, etc.)

I take it we are still talking about Word 2007? Then Word Options > New, or
you can add the "New ..." command to the QAT

I'm afraid Graham's reply was incomprehensible! He's programmer-
oriented, I'm user-oriented. (For instance, I don't know what he means
by "add-in" -- I thought those are the annoying things that Adobe
sticks on the Ribbon that mess up Word.) As I said, I have no access
to the hard drive I used in September that had my 2007 customization,
so I have to redo the whole month's fiddling with the QAT.

Any expertise I have in programming was largely learned through these forums
from people like Jay.

Add-ins can take a variety of forms. Essentially they load with Word to
provide added functionality, such as the Word 2003 toolbars that I described
in http://www.gmayor.com/Toolbars_in_word_2007.htm which are provided by an
add-in template.

Any template saved in the Word startup folder will load with Word to provide
the macros, toolbars and autotext entries it contains to all documents as if
they were stored in the normal template.

As for Adobe, if you have paid that company for its expensive product, you
would not want to cripple it by not having the toolbars available in Word
that provide its integration with the product. If you are merely going to
use it as a print driver you could save yourself a lot of money and install
PrimoPDF - or download the Word 2007 add-in.

 

[Jay Freedman]

How do I base a new document on a particular template? Word opens with
a blank document ready to go, and Ctrl-N doesn't offer a choice.
(Whereas, Ctrl-N in FrameMaker opens the dialog for choosing the
template, page orientation, etc.)

The "official" way (in Word 2003) is to click File > New and when the task
pane opens, click the link for "On my computer" and choose the template from
the dialog that appears. (Somebody at Microsoft really blew it on this one.)
The quick way is to open the Templates folder in Windows Explorer and
double-click the template you want to use; the default action for *.dot
files is "New" so Word will open with a document based on that template
instead of one based on Normal.dot.

If you're interested in a toolbar button that directly opens the Templates
dialog instead of mucking about in the stupid task pane, go to the Tools >
Customize dialog, select the category "All Commands", and drag the
FileNewDialog item to a toolbar.

I'm afraid Graham's reply was incomprehensible! He's programmer-
oriented, I'm user-oriented. (For instance, I don't know what he means
by "add-in" -- I thought those are the annoying things that Adobe
sticks on the Ribbon that mess up Word.) As I said, I have no access
to the hard drive I used in September that had my 2007 customization,
so I have to redo the whole month's fiddling with the QAT.

In practical terms, an add-in in Word is just a template stored in the Word
Startup location. The article
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/WhatTemplatesStore.htm explains
it.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It's not clear whether this question is now about Word 2003 or Word 2007, so
here's how in both:

Word 2003: Choose New... on the File menu. This will open the New Document
task pane. Under Templates, choose "On my computer..." to open the New
dialog, where you will find specific document templates (including those
that ship with Word); if you've used a specific template "recently," it will
be on the MRU list in that task pane. I personally consider this
ridiculously inconvenient, so I have replaced the New button on my toolbar
(which creates a new document based on Normal.dot) with one that represents
the FileNewDialog command (Tools | Customize), which opens the dialog
directly.

Word 2007: Office Button | New opens the New Document dialog. In the panel
on the left, "My templates..." takes you to the old New dialog, and of
course there are myriad other options, including a raft of online templates
("Installed templates" gets you to the ones that ship with Word).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

How do I base a new document on a particular template? Word opens with
a blank document ready to go, and Ctrl-N doesn't offer a choice.
(Whereas, Ctrl-N in FrameMaker opens the dialog for choosing the
template, page orientation, etc.)

I'm afraid Graham's reply was incomprehensible! He's programmer-
oriented, I'm user-oriented. (For instance, I don't know what he means
by "add-in" -- I thought those are the annoying things that Adobe
sticks on the Ribbon that mess up Word.) As I said, I have no access
to the hard drive I used in September that had my 2007 customization,
so I have to redo the whole month's fiddling with the QAT.

--
And I can't do _any_ of this now, thanks to Vista idiocies!! (Where do
I go to complain about Vista idiocies?) This time my computer guy
didn't take the time to install Office2007 (in September he gave me
what turned out to be the loaner fully loaded), so I put off entering
the Product Key (figuring it would take a while). What happened was
that as soon as I did so, at the end of the day, it demanded that I go
get Updates. So I went got Updates -- 58 of them, nearly 6 Gb -- and
left it to download them while I watched House and yesterday's Boston
Legal and SVU. And when I got back to the computer, it turned out it
had gone to sleep after 1 hour with 1/3 of the downloads downloaded.
So I found under Energy Saver a place to tell it to Never go to sleep
and left it to finish downloading overnight. Eight hours later, I
found it asleep again, with less than half the downloads Installed!!!!
So now it's been Installing again for an hour, but probably not with
total efficiency, as I've been doing my email and newsgroups. The
Vista tachometer at the side of the desktop often has the pointer at
100% (1.5 Gb RAM), so having typed this useless complaint, I suppose I
should turn off the internets and go read a book or something while it
finishes.

 

[Jay Freedman]

For completeness, the 2007 Quick Access Toolbar equivalent of the
FileNewDialog button is in the "Commands Not In the Ribbon" category with
the title "New Document or Template..." and corresponds to the command
FileNewDialogClassic.

 

[grammatim]

I take it we are still talking about Word 2007? Then Word Options > New, or
you can add the "New ..." command to the QAT

No, we are now, and have always been, talking about 2003.

Any expertise I have in programming was largely learned through these forums
from people like Jay.

Yet you're the macros maven ...

Add-ins can take a variety of forms. Essentially they load with Word to
provide added functionality, such as the Word 2003 toolbars that I described
inhttp://www.gmayor.com/Toolbars_in_word_2007.htmwhich are provided by an
add-in template.

Then I don't know what you were referring to when you mentioned add-
ins in your earlier message.

Any template saved in the Word startup folder will load with Word to provide
the macros, toolbars and autotext entries it contains to all documents as if
they were stored in the normal template.

See, there's a piece of information that was not previously provided.
Jay gave me the path for finding the startup folder, so I'll put that
other template dated July there, and hopefully have my toolbars back.

Why there are _two_ templates in that old XP folder will, presumably,
remain a mystery.

As for Adobe, if you have paid that company for its expensive product, you
would not want to cripple it by not having the toolbars available in Word
that provide its integration with the product. If you are merely going to
use it as a print driver you could save yourself a lot of money and install
PrimoPDF - or download the Word 2007 add-in.

Actually, my publisher is buying me Adobe CS4, because I will need to
use InDesign and probably Illustrator and (shudder) Photoshop. Acrobat
just comes with, and I don't expect to be using it for anything at
all. I took the 30-day trial download to start to get acquainted with
it. The most useful things Acrobat can do are crop pages of pdfs, and
combine parts of different pdfs. For creating pdfs, both pdf995 and
Perfectpdf ($5 at OfficeDepot) have worked fine.