Charles, your reply and links contain a wealth of information about templates and certainly warrant the time it will take to study them. Thank you very much.


For now, could you help me with an immediate recurring problem I'm having with protecting my macros and the shortcuts? Some background is necessary, and I apologize for the length:

Some of the macros I must use (not commercial ones with guarantees) cause Word to crash. (I just learned from their creator that this is prone to happening in a document with tracked changes, or at least, ones like mine that have many t/c.) When I reopen the program, I am prompted to indicate if I want a particular template – which, so I’m always informed, had changes made to it -- to load. I know from hard experience that the correct answer is always yes. Otherwise, my free macros are all gone, or at least the shortcuts are. The prompt is *not* for the Normal or even Normal.New template (which, I think, was created after one of the crashes or after I added new macros), but another one that holds a commercial suite; it has only two features I use, but they are useful to me, so I’d like them and my free macros and shortcuts all to be available.


After one of the crashes last night, the macros (or shortcuts) were gone. I followed instructions for attaching one of the templates (can’t remember which) to one of my documents and got everything back, but the same procedure did not work on another document. I also tried creating new documents from each of the above-mentioned templates to see if my free macros would appear. Finally I gave up and manually added them and the shortcuts back. None of the commercial macros were affected.


I have 3 questions for Word 2007:

1) Since I must continue using my macros and another crash is possible, which specific steps would you recommend taking now so I don’t have to spend hours reconstructing them again?
2) Can you tell me how to make a given template the default that all my new Word documents will be based on?
3) Must the default template be in the Startup folder or the Templates folder?

Many thanks.