Word Add-In Startup Issue

[ptmuldoon]

I am going to have to have a talk with my IT Department but before doing so hoping someone can help me steer them in the right direction a well.

I work for a midsize cpa firm with multiple departments. And our firm is trying to centralize the location of Add-ins for both Excel and Word for all departments. And the user can then check and un-check which add-ins he or she needs at any time.

We are using Office 2013 at the moment as well.

For Excel, this seems pretty easy. We can push the Excel Add-ins from a network location to everyone's %APPDATA%....Microsoft\Addins Location. And the user can then check and un-check which add-ins start when Excel starts.

But this does not seem to be the case for Word. If I enable a Word Add-in (really an dotm file) with the Options | Add-ins | Word Add-Ins, the Add-in will load. But this does not stay checked each time. Thus, closing and re-opening word does not start the add-in.

Including the add-in (dotm) file in the Word Startup problem will load the file each time. But we need the user to be able to pick and chose which word add-ins to load and not have to do that every time Word starts. So we can't really place 10 word addins in the Startup folder and have them all load when the user may only need 1 or 2 depending on their department.

I hope I explained it well enough. So is it possibly to have Word enable and disable a select number of add-ins to load on start without having in the Startup folder?

Thanks


PT

[Charles Kenyon]

Give each user his/her own Startup Folder.
Teach him/her how to copy from shared location to personal.
Have a part of network login xcopy changed ones from shared to personal.

[ptmuldoon]

All users already have a %APPDATA% /...Microsoft/Word/Startup folder.

And we already IT scripts that push the files to all users word Startup folders. But the issue then becomes we want the user to be able to enable and enable each dotm / Add-in file as they need it.

The end user should not have to copy each file they need to their startup folder as they need them. We also then run a risk of a user deleting a network copy, and prefer to lock those directories out of users.

Example would be having an IT script copy 5 Word Add-in / dotm files to a users Startup folder. We then want the user to be able to enable and disable those 5 as they need to depending on the type of client work they are performing.

[Charles Kenyon]

If they are in the User's Word Startup Folder, they will be loaded when Word is started. They can easily unload them. Why do that, though, unless they conflict or otherwise cause problems?

You could have an AutoExec procedure that launches the templates dialog so that they can uncheck them when they start Word. You could even attach that procedure to a keyboard shortcut and/or QAT icon to let the user launch it at any time to make changes.