I’ve had a problem with my orgs Normal.dot, possibly only within my organisations IT environment. I’ve been technical writing for over 25 years, am a power-user of MS Word; there’s no indiscipline with how I develop and use MS Word templates and styles.
Custom tables were found corrupted, arbitrarily on open. I had to do a weird workaround to get any operational stability back with my custom tables. I have some 14 or so, for the org’s branding requirements I have to deal with.
Whenever a custom template, with custom table styles embedded, was opened with the “corrupted’ Normal.dot template, the custom tables were broken. Deleting the custom tables using the Styles formatting window ‘Styles’ investigator window, then copying them back into the open custom template from another closed template failed – templates did not accept changes and did not save these changes. I knew I had a ‘real’ problem then… [removed]
Multiple custom templates had custom table styles broken on open. MS Word was open or closed. Right click on custom templates to open MS Word caused custom table corruption instantly on open. Copy over custom tables failed using all methods.
I blew away the corrupted normal.dot, saved a known good back-up into the default Explorer folder (note that IT scrubs all macros out of dotm templates in this location – yeah, they trust us here). From my new, good ‘Normal.dotm’ I then had to use the Template window’s dialog ‘Organiser’ function to copy good custom tables into my broken templates – which were unopened during the copy phase, and they did save as new versions. More detail is here: https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/Windows-and-Office-General/issues/23.
If anyone is experiencing this please let me know, it might be MS. Otherwise I need to start a fight with my IT department, but I need evidence it is at their end – they already tamper with MS Word, and have admitted they don’t know what they’re doing in the past, but tell me they never cause problems with what they do… If anyone knows of something in the MS Word XML that could do this – I really need to know that please?
Many thanks all, regards; Warren. [removed]
Moderator’s Note: Sorry, Warren, we run a dry site here. Also, topic moved to more appropriate forum area.
