Right-clicking and selecting Open is how Microsoft designed Word to open template files so that you can work in them and not create a blank document based on them. There is no way to right-click on a template, select Open, and have it create a new blank document based on the template.
Your users are not using Word to create blank documents in the way Microsoft designed the program to work.
The primary method of creating a new file based on a template is via
File > New. In the screen that appears, there is a
Personal button. When users click Personal, Word displays all of the templates in the user's default template storage folder. The user should then click on the template with which they want to create a new document.
The other way to create a new file from a template is, as you noted, to double-click on a template that's already in a folder somewhere.
But, again, it is not possible to right-click on a template, select Open, and create a document based on that template.
To create a new file based on a template using VBA, use the following:
Code:
Sub CreateNewDocFromUserTemplate() ' 03/23/2022
' Create a variable for the filepath to your template:
Dim strFilepath As String
' Use the Environ("UserProfile") function to get the first portion of the
' user's file path -- that is, C:\User\username -- and concatenate with the
' rest of the path to the template in your users' template folder:
strFilepath = Environ("UserProfile") & _
"\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Replace-This-With-Your-Template.dotm"
' Here's what the full string looks like:
Debug.Print strFilepath
' Create new document based on template:
Documents.Add (strFilepath)
End Sub