Hi again macropod,

Everything works fine if I use a local template.

But as soon as I use a network template where the connection to the network is severed that's when the document takes forever to load presumably as Word is doing a network search. This is similar to when you click on a mapped drive in Explorer where you've lost the network connection and Explorer does this big search phase holding up the works for that instance of Explorer.

I could see a potential solution where the macro asked "is network present?" if not then use local normal.dot template if yes then use attached template. I'm guessing that's a pretty tall order though. I think MS should reduce the search time, no wonder many avoid using attached templates! Im beginning to wonder if I should do the same and go back to .dotx templates for each individual project doc.
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On another note. I decided to create a master styles template and then create "template" docs attached to that template (.docx). So if we wanted to update the styles like fonts, colours, etc, we could without having to update each document "template" individually. The reason I did this is because you can't attach a template to a template (.dotx). So there's no way to manage the styles of templates at a global level. I looked at the 'global templates/addins' but its even worse there as you need to have a local copy present for them to work.

I'm certainly wanting to find a good solution to this before I create any more project templates as don't want to have to redo them.