Track template usage

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We’re just upgrading to Office 2007. We have over 1000 Word templates and as part of the conversion we want to build in some method of tracking how much & how often they’re used. A couple of options I thought of were writing code to:
– append ‘date run’ to a txt file (1 txt file for each template I guess) every time the template is run
or
– create a couple of custom doc properties in the template and modify their value every time the template is run to record both the date last run and the number of times run

Does anyone have any other ideas?

Thanks…
Adri

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We’re just upgrading to Office 2007. We have over 1000 Word templates and as part of the conversion we want to build in some method of tracking how much & how often they’re used.

Are these templates in a shared folder on a Windows server? In that case, you could enable file auditing on that folder (e.g., using whatever event corresponds to opening the file) and see whether the Windows event log captures useful information. This would be much faster than editing the code in each template.

If that fails, updating an external file/database seems safer than making changes to the template itself; I suspect that in a shared template scenario, users may be asked to “Save As” to save the updated property if another user opened the template first.

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Yes, the templates are in a shared folder on the server. But they would be doing a File>New, not a File>Open, so do you think the file auditing could still work?

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Yes, the templates are in a shared folder on the server. But they would be doing a File>New, not a File>Open, so do you think the file auditing could still work?

It’s worth testing. When Word accesses the file, Windows may consider that to be opening the file. If not, perhaps there is another file access event that gives you what you need.

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It’s worth testing. When Word accesses the file, Windows may consider that to be opening the file. If not, perhaps there is another file access event that gives you what you need.

I asked our network guy to check it out and apparently it does log it, so many thanks for the great suggestion…sure saved me a lot of work!

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