Template gripes

[Stephen Quist]

Hi,

We have some documents that were created on foreign networks. I suppose the
creators thought they were using Word the way It Was Meant To Be Used when
they used a common template and attached it to the document.

Unfortunately those templates refer to .dot files on machines and shares in
their network. Those machines, shares and files are not accessible from our
network. As a result it takes a very long times (~5 minutes) to open one of
those documents.

It occurs to me that this problem is pretty general. Networks change all the
time, machines come and go. Any document that uses an attached template from
a "well known" location is vulnerable to this sort of problem. It doesn't
have to happen only when a document is created in one location and read in
another.

What can be done to alleviate this problem? The only suggestion I've come up
with is to put another machine on my network with the name and shares that
are referred to in the documents. Is there any other way to cope? Can I
create an additional name for an existing machine that will resolve properly
for Word? Is there a way to open these documents that bypasses this template
checking?

Are there any recommended practices for using attached templates that avoid
this problem?
Who ever thought these were a good idea anyway?

Thanks,

Steve

PS. I realize these are really newuser questions, but no other word group
seemed appropriate either. Is there a better place to ask these questions
and is there a move afoot to create more appropriate newsgroups?

Also, some of these documents want a German hyphenation dll. Is there a way
to acquire that in an English version of Word, (2000 or 2002)?

 

[Margaret Aldis]

Hi Stephen

See here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830561/

For a variety of reasons, it's usually best to keep copies of templates on
the local machine. If you are moving over to this scheme anyway, you may
find that simply putting the template into the local user templates folder
does the trick, as this template will be found first. (I haven't tried this
trick for this particular issue - it may be Word will still be bothered by
the missing path.)

 

[Stephen Quist]

Hi Margaret,

I fully agree with you about keeping templates on local machines. Otherwise
you end up with unacceptable dependencies on network topology. The trouble
we have is that other offices did not adhere to that discipline, probably
through
ignorance. As a result we have to deal with the mess.

Actually, I have to confess, we generated documents with the same problem,
again through ignorance, using the seemingly normal feature of workgroup
templates. I've had to avoid moving a share to another machine largely
because
our workgroup templates reside on that share. Offhand, in a group setting, I
don't see any really good ways to avoid the problem. It seems like a design
flaw in Word.

Anyway, thanks for the link to the KB article. At least it gave me some VBA
solutions that I had thought about trying to write myself.

Cheers,

Steve