Hi,



I'm trying to begin a new series of documents as Help for web pages I'm creating so I opened an existing document to use as a template so I would have the proper styling. I removed what I didn't want and saved it as a template. This is nothing new for me as I've been using this software for many years. Well, various versions of it anyway.

When I open this new template to start a new document, the styling is all wrong and any effort I make to correct it just causes more issues. (By the way: MS Word 2013 & W10)

I was told that there's a setting somewhere to automatically load a predefined style and I'm guessing this is the issue. However, I cannot find anything that sems like it would control this behavior.

I always open the styles box from the Paragraph area of the Home tab to watch what's being used and what I see in my document is completely different from what I see when I open the original document that I created my template from.

Any help (or solution) would be greatly appreciated.
Red.

Charles Kenyon has a very good article/tutorial on "templates" that should help you at http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/templates.htm. Within that link are further links for basic formatting., styles, et al that will help you further.

HTHs...

Thanks JimP.

Thank you Jim. That article was a lot of work and I think still stands up.
See also Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word.

Make sure you actually have a "template" and not a "document" being used as a pattern. This is Word jargon and not English. Normally one does not open a template to use it. Rather, when you double-click on a template or use it with File > New, you start a new document attached to that template.

Is a new document created from your template set to automatically update styles from the template? With this setting, if your new document, based on your template is unable to find your template, it will update its styles from the Normal template.

See also: What happens when I send my document to someone else? Will Word mess up my formatting?

Charles and JimP,

Charles,
The article is very interesting and I will be sure to give it a thorough going over when time permits.

After reading your response, I checked the Default Personal Templates location under the Save section of the Options and it's set to the correct folder. However, I clicked on the File Locations button under General of the Advanced section of the Options and saw that User Templates is pointing to the C drive rather than my network folder location where I keep my templates.

I changed this location, created a new document from my template and bingo, that document had the correct styles. So that was the problem all along.

Thanks you both for all your help.
Red

Very important note:

Only Word can create a (complete) normal template. You cannot take a document and save it as normal.dotm and have a fully functional normal template.

You can open the normal template created by Word and change the styles in that template. Then, save that template. How to Open the Normal Template

You can also use a different template, not the normal template, as the basis for new documents by default. This isn't simple, but it can be done. An example is Easy New Document Template Package.

You can set up a template to hold styles for other documents that is not the normal template but which is used as a resource. A Global StyleSheet in Microsoft Word?

You can also use other templates as the basis for new documents by choosing those templates when creating documents. These are called document templates and are stored in one of the template folders described in my article on templates. Access to thes is further explored in File New Variations in the Versions of Word

The User templates folder should not be a network folder unless you will never use Word when your network is down. It should be a local folder.

The normal template should not be a shared file. Thus, there is little reason to be storing it on a network folder.

Thanks for all the info.