Hi.



I work for a law firm where everyone's MS Word uses a global template file called "Normal.dotm" including myself. However, there is an ongoing issue with when I try closing my sessions - Word often(but not sometimes) gives the following messages, and I have to close them(Please see the attachments). Apparently Word thinks that I have to perform save as for this Normal.dotm template. Experts, could you tell me what this is about?

Thanks

Attached Images

	firsterror.jpg (81.8 KB, 17 views)
	saveas.png (128.5 KB, 14 views)

It is probably a read-only template ... your firm probably doesn't want anybody to change it

If that is the case, Go to Word Options and uncheck the box for Prompt To Save Normal Template

Hmmm that check box is unticked.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291352 page listed 3 cases, and I believe our case is case 2, as I know that we have a bunch of auto macros that get run when we open Word/produce certain documents/quit word.

I'm gonna have to experiment with the systemf for a bit. but thank you for pointing me to the right direction.

Oops ... looks like I got that setting backwards, for the check box in Word Options. There may not be a way to force Word to automatically reject changes to the Normal template during an exit.


An Auto macro, in and of itself, would not change the Normal template unless it was programmed to do so. If that was the case, everybody in the firm would be having the same problem. I am assuming you are the only one.

There are several things you can do while editing a document that could be changing the Normal template, such as: creating auto-text entries, creating or modifying styles, adding or changing keyboard shortcuts, creating or editing macros, changing certain Word Options, and probably other things as well. If you were doing any of those things, you might not be able to save/replace your Normal (if it is read-only), but you should not get that first error message either.

There are other things that can go wrong and cause the first error message you are getting to be generated. Your registry could be corrupted; you could have an orphaned winword.exe process running from when you attempted to close a Word session earlier and it didn’t close properly; you could have opened a Word attachment to an Outlook email. (I don’t know how common the Outlook attachment problem is but I saw it mentioned as a possibility and a workaround was suggested, to save attachments rather then opening them from Outlook, then open them in Word.)

It looks like this is going to be a difficult problem to solve.

First thing is that although Normal.dotm is a global template, it is not a template that should be shared by multiple users. Each user should have his/her own Normal.dotm template. You can share customizations through other Global Templates.

Templates in Microsoft Word

Second recommendation would be to turn on the display of filename extensions in Windows. You are asking for confusion by hiding them. (Windows hides them by default because MS thinks they will scare people and make them think they are using DOS.)

Hi NeilSC. This is actually happening to everyone in the firm and they are asking me why, cuz I manage a software called Caseflow that uses Word and it runs post-processing VBA macro for each process it executes, which I think is causing the error to occur.

I have tried ticking the checkbox but the error persists. If I am to look through the the 1000 page long the post processing VBA(which I reckon I'm gonna do), do you have tips on what I should look for?