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Word Templates

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by ljackson.desoto

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Help! Don't you hate it when you do something and dont' know how you did it! I have a client that I have created some word templates for. She wants them zipped into an executable file so each user can unzip on their computers. No problem. However, the default location for templates in Word is user specific and they cannot change that location so I need to unzip the files somewhere else. I also need these templates to show when the user clicks, file new in Word. I tried a couple of places and when I saved on the network drive a shortcut to these templates appeared when I went file, new. But when I unzipped to the local drive, they did not show when I did file, new. I don't know how the others are showing. Question is, when templates are located somewhere other than the default folder, how do I get them to show in the new doc wizard when the user hits file, new. O/S is Win 2k and Win XP and the program is Word 2k. Thanks for your help!

6 replies

by tig2

Not altogether certain what you are seeing. In order for a template to be a default template it needs to live in C:\Documents and Settings\"userprofile"\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates.

I think that you can unzip your file to that directory. But you will be touching all the workstations to do that. When I have sent templates to an end user, I can generally email the file along with step by step instructions and get the users to place them appropriately.

by ljackson.desoto

That's where the problem is. Somehow another tab got created that said shortcut to and the name of the file where these new templates are. I just don't know why it did it when I saved the templates to the network drive and did not when I saved to the c drive.

by bschaettle

Here's a solutuion that I use:

[1] Make sure all the affected users have the same drive letter mapped to their network storage area. We use "U:\"

[2] Create a folder on everyone's U:\ drive called Word Templates and give yourself "write" privileges to these folders.

[3] Copy all the templates into all the "Word Templates" folders. This sounds like a lot of work, but is incredibly fast if you write a script to do it for you.

[4] For all the affected users, open Word, then under Tools+Options+FileLocations point the "User templates" to the Word Templates folder.

Now you can distribute new templates to all these folks anytime you want to. Unfortunately if they're using laptops the templates won't follow them out of the office....

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