So save the changes you made for your 'Normal.dotx' file to Word's 'Normal.dotm' template. Alternatively, save your 'Normal.dotx' template as a macro-enabled template (e.g. AbNormal.dotm), in:


then go to that folder, delete 'Normal.dotm' and rename 'AbNormal.dotm' as 'Normal.dotm'.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Have tried all these things. The problem seems to arise when putting the the words 'normal' and 'dotm' together. Even simply changing the dotx to dotm file extension causes the problem. So even if I have a normal.dotx template (which displays as I want it to) and change it to normal.dotm then the paper colour displays 'wrong' according to the Windows setting. It seems that normal.dotx obeys Windows but normal.dotm does not.

Taking a normal.dotx template and saving it as normal.dotm will not work.

1. Word will not let you do this from within Word, for good reason.
2. If you do it from Windows, you will make Word work poorly. Only Word can create a fully-functioning normal.dotm file.

Rename your normal.dotx file to MyTemplate.dotx. Use that as the basis for your new documents that you want to have these characteristics.


If you want it to be the basis for all new documents, save it as MyTemplate.dotm and include code to make this happen. See Letterhead AddIn(s) - Default New Document for an example of how this can be done.

I have decided to use a work-around as follows : - I have created a normal.dotx template alongside the normal.dotm template and I have created a shortcut to normal.dotx on my desktop. Double-clicking this launches Word and shows the pale green 'paper' colour I want. Normal.dotx obeys Windows Registry setting but normal.dotm does not.

This works fine for new documents. Also documents created using this template continue to display correctly thereafter even though the document has the same docx extension as one created from the normal.dotm template. Weird!

Documents created previously by launching Word normally using the normal.dotm template still show as white 'paper' so this work-around doe not help in those cases.

I'll consider this thread closed now.

Thanks to all respondents.