@Charles Kenyon - SOLVED? Really?? "Not so much solved as answered." And not answered to my satisfaction and I am the OP. "You can't" is no answer... it means the ONE PERSON who answered doesn't know how, or that no one here knows the answer, because there is certainly a way to make Word available via shell (as it is by default) but to have it call a different template *IF* modifying the default template is "impossible" as claimed.

This is the LEAST HELPFUL FORUM I have ever been on in my 21 years online when the mods swoop in and mark a question as solved/answered when it is neither and has ONE SINGLE REPLY that is decidedly UNHELPFUL that basically blamed ME for using the shell menu to start Word. What I see here is laziness and ignorance. "If we don't know the answer we just say 'you can't' and mark it solved."

Please do ban me. There is no reason to come back here with "help" like this. I should have expected as much from an MS forum! For MS fanboys MS is never wrong... it's always the user who needs to change their habits to accommodate the bugs and shortcomings in MS.

Maybe you can't but I can. Just not with any "help" from this forum!

Thanks for nothing guys, and have a great day.