I needed to build a template from scratch. To start, I temporarily renamed my Normal template to force Word to create a clean Normal.dotx, then created a new blank doc to save as a template in which to work.



When I went back to File Explorer and renamed my Normal template back to Normal.dotm, it appears that, somehow, Word killed the template. There's a Normal.dotm there, but it's brand new (has no save history), and it's the default MS Normal style set. The original is nowhere to be found: not in temp files, not in the recycle bin. IT staff ran a recovery app that did not turn up any old, recoverable versions. I searched my entire drive for *.dotm.

I'm wondering if the issue was, I tried to rename the template while Word was open, and that caused Bad Things to happen? I didn't realize I had Word open (minimized on another monitor) until after I renamed. Is this a known issue?

Finally, I don't have much hope to recover it, and I do have a back-up that's a few weeks old, so all is not lost, but if this problem sounds familiar to you and you have an idea about a last-ditch attempt to find it, I'd be grateful -- thank you.