Colleague comes up with request "can I save a master copy of this fill-in document on SharePoint so people can create and save their own copies?" It's for a pro forma invoice.

My suggestion: use a .dotx template, so each time it's opened the user gets a new, unsaved document. Fill in, save locally, process farther … I verified this, starting with a .dotx on the file server. Just what we want!

SharePoint, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be aware of this useful .dotx behaviour! the default "click and open" opens the .dotx itself, so any content that's typed in will be saved back in the master copy. Explaining to users "no, don't open the file: you need to right-click and select a specific option so you can download a local copy" is just asking for trouble.

In-house SharePoint support hadn't even heard about .dotx …

Any suggestions or information will be welcome.

Make it a .dotm with an AutoOpen macro that creates a new document based on the template and closes the template.


In vba parlance, the document holding the code is ThisDocument rather than ActiveDocument.


Also, make your template Read-Only and keep a backup.


Note, I am not familiar with SharePoint.

Putting macros into a template in Sharepoint is not usually a good idea. If your company has any level of IT security they will have disabled macros from http sources so the macros will be disabled.

Word templates are not well suited to life in Sharepoint. It is a reasonable place to store documents or templates that can be downloaded to a hard drive but not so good for 'working' dotx or dotm templates. Working templates need to be on your hard drive or a mapped network drive. Sharepoint can be a repository for saving them but if you want them to 'work' like Microsoft intended, they need to be saved outside of Sharepoint to enable that functionality.

If there is no automation (macros) required, I would save the file as docx and put it in a Sharepoint folder where users only have READ access. They can pick up the latest version from there and will be forced to save it locally or on a different Sharepoint location if they want to change it.

If you need macros with it, the dotm template containing the code should be saved to the user's User Templates or Workgroup Templates location by your IT group. You can then either ignore Sharepoint or put a docx file (with the dotm template attached) into your Sharepoint location where your users know where to get it.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

I generally recommend distributing (through the user login) workgroup and global templates to the appropriate folders on a user's computer. That is true with traditional network drives as well as SharePoint.

When I was doing this I used the old XCOPY command for the updates. There are likely more efficient methods available now.

Thanks for this useful information – or, to put it another way, thanks for confirming my suspicions.

> If your company has any level of IT security …
Oh, yes. Oh yes indeed. It's taken months to find the one person in the support staff who realised my PC had to be moved (for an hour!) to a different security zone so that I could update licences from a major software company.

Fine-tuning SharePoint access is a theoretically interesting solution, but I'll be shot down in flames if I suggest polluting our environment with folders. I'll take a look at the possibilities for managing read access to an individual document, and then be shot down for adding to the load of our non-existent local administrator.