With some pride, I can say that, so far as I know, my article is the best documentation there is on Word templates. About 15 or 20 years ago it was copied onto the Microsoft website with my permission, but has not been updated there since.

There is documentation at Microsoft that is not shared with the general public. I believe their MVP volunteers get access to more than the general public, but not to everything.

My article could stand a good rewrite, I know. I am a lawyer, not a coder nor a technical writer. I welcome chances to make it better, though.

The people who design and code Word do not, as far as I know, actually use it. It is a hodgepodge of code and very creaky. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. The multiple versions for different platforms adds to the confusion almost exponentially. As far as I can tell, Sharepoint and Word's online and mobile versions do not use templates the way that the desktop versions do. They treat them like documents.

Charles,

In researching templates for my how-to article, I looked at a bunch of web-pages on templates. Yours were the most useful. My article's appendix has links to the web-pages I found helpful.

Your description of Word's programmers is consistent with my experience in software development. Software developers typically don't have a lot of experience using the program they develop, mainly because they are busy programming.

I suspect Microsoft has one Word programmer who is an expert at templates (maybe a few experts). He probably has a super high IQ (super programmer), at the level where most people never know anyone that smart. He would know all about the code that processes templates, and all about how templates work in versions of Word going back to the 1990s.

Maintaining downward compatibility like that is very difficult, e.g., if the next version of Word breaks templates from Word 2003, there will be an international uproar.

Word's code for processing templates probably goes back 20+ years and was developed by a bunch of Microsoft programmers over the years, many of whom no longer work on Word or no longer work at Microsoft. (So, you can't ask them about the programs they wrote, e.g., how and why it does particular quirky things.)

Programmers currently working on Word have to reverse engineer that old code (old programs) when they add new features to Word. Not breaking old code would be an on-going and big challenge, and it would make adding new features increasingly difficult over the years.

Being a Word programmer would be a very hard job, and very hard to do well, e.g., be productive and not have a lot of bugs. But, it probably pays great (maybe $180+K for the template expert?)