Protecting Word Templates?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Meghan
  • Start date Start date
M

Meghan

I use Word in Office 2000. We use many templates (.dot) in
my office but, occassionally, someone will make changes to
the template instead of a copy. How do we protect the
templates without forcing the "save as" versions to have
password restrictions?

EXAMPLE: we want our proposal template protected, however
we obviously need to customize proposals AND we don't want
our clients to have to type in a password to open them.
Help?
 
First, people should not be opening the templates. They should be accessing
them through File > New, not File > Open. (If you are hyperlinking to
templates, this is a cause of your problem.) This creates a new document
without using Save As.

You can set the folder permissions for your workgroup templates folder to
read-only.
--

Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
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This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
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You're right - they shouldn't be opening the .dot files.
They all have the templates set up through Word. Yet...it
still happens that someone will go to the .dot files
themselves and open the file incorrectly. So, we were
hoping there was a way to password protect the files so
they won't be tampered with during those accidents.
Any thoughts?
-----Original Message-----
Hi Meghan,

Hmmm.... seems like you might be going about accessing
Click to expand...
the templates in the wrong way. My guess is that your
staff is opening the actual .dot file. That's the only way
to change a template as far as I know.
What you *should* be doing instead is saving the template
Click to expand...
to your templates folder. It's usually set to "Documents
and Settings/Your Name/Application
Data/Microsoft/Templates". You can change this location by
going to "Tools/Options/File Locations" and selecting a
different directory (in Word 2003). In fact I recommend
doing this so that everyone can use the same folder for
the templates. We have ours set to "C:/Templates". Of
course, everyone will have to make this change on their
version of Word or everyone will be looking in a different
directory for document templates. You might need to copy
over the other document templates that are already in the
present Templates folder as well.
Now when you want to open a document using TemplateX, go
Click to expand...
to File/New (in Word 2003 you have the additional step of
clicking "on my computer" in the sidebar to avoid
searching the web for templates) and select your template
from the list. Now when you click save (or use CTRL-S)
Word will assume you want to save a document (.doc), not a
template. In fact, the only way to save it so that you
replace the existing template is to intentionally change
the document type to .dot -- and even then Word will ask
you if you are sure you want to replace the existing
template.
 
Set the folder permissions so that it is read-only for people who are not
authorized to make changes.
--

Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---------
This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.
 
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