Changing defaults

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My workplace has recently upgraded from Office 2003 to 2010.

My question regarding Word is: how does one change their default styles and fonts in ’10 ?
Thanks in advance.

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You do this the same way as previously – by editing the template. If you are not specifically choosing a template for new documents then the template is called Normal.dotm or Normal.dotx and it is located in your Application Data/Microsoft/Templates folder.

You can navigate to this location by pasting the following path into your Windows Explorer folder path (or the Start Button>Run dialog)
%appdata%/Microsoft/Templates

Once you find the Normal.dot? file, right click it and choose Open and change the styles and fonts to your liking in this document and then save and close.

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You do this the same way as previously – by editing the template. If you are not specifically choosing a template for new documents then the template is called Normal.dotm or Normal.dotx and it is located in your Application Data/Microsoft/Templates folder.

You can navigate to this location by pasting the following path into your Windows Explorer folder path (or the Start Button>Run dialog)
%appdata%/Microsoft/Templates

Once you find the Normal.dot? file, right click it and choose Open and change the styles and fonts to your liking in this document and then save and close.

Thanks for your suggestion Andrew, however my normal.dot file is empty – any other ideas?

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It is normal.dotm, not normal.dot. It is not empty. It contains your styles. The style set when you first type in it is the style all of your new documents will begin with unless you start them from a different template.

See Template Basics. Although written primarily about earlier versions, the information remains valid.

Note – do not save any text in normal.dotm.

You may also want to look at Basic Formatting and Changing the Default Font.

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Normal.dotm is supposed to be empty of text and such. But it has the styles and page setup that it will share with any documents you create from it. In W2007/10, the “defaults” are the settings we can make on the Set Defaults tab (Styles pane > Manage styles), and are font, font size and color, paragraph position, and line and paragraph spacing.

You can change the defaults more easily by changing style sets (Home tab > Styles group). For example, if you prefer the fonts and spacing of W2003, you can choose the Word 2003 style set. Each style set changes more than the defaults. Headings and other styles also change, as does normal and any style based on it.

Pam

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You can also use the “Set as Default” button found in several of the dialogs (Paragraph, Font, Language, etc.). When you click this button, it updates the Normal style in the active template (usually Normal.dotm). If you have the “Prompt before saving Normal template” option turned on (in Word Options, Advanced, Save settings), you should choose OK when a dialog prompts you to save any changes you have made in this way.

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