doc looks for template at old location

**macdonell** · 2012-06-18 21:46

I have upgraded an old windows 2000 PC to a newer PC with Windows XP in a small business office that I provide support for. The PC acts as a file server for 4 other PCs in the office running Office 2003 under Windows XP. There are a lot of custom templates used to generate most documents. Normal.dot is hardly used.
Since installing the new server, there is a noticible pause as each document is opened. watching closely in the lower left corner of the Word window, I see that Word is searching for the template at the old server location.
Is there any way to configure something that tells the opening documents to look for the template at the new server location?
When I transfer a file to my office computer with Office 2010(another physical location), I notice a similar phenomenon. The document, before opening, is looking for the original template that it was based upon.
Thank you for some help

**Andrew Lockton** · 2012-06-18 23:42

Do you have a template with the same name in your User Templates folder?

**Charles Kenyon** · 2012-06-19 05:25

When I am sending a document based on a template other than normal I will often attach it to the normal template prior to sending. I always keep the option to update styles from the template turned off. I recorded a macro to do this.

If you have staff in need of a project, you could assign them the task of updating your old documents files.

If you are using old documents as source material to create new documents instead of templates, this is one of the prices you eventually pay.

**Stylus** · 2012-06-19 06:21

I faced this problem some years ago when the the template location was arbitrarily shut down by management. I had to research and cobble together a complex structure to handle this. It involves an event handler that is started whenever Word opens. One of several things it does is to check the name of the template that the document was originally based on. It then remaps the filepath to that template in its new location. I worked on XP and Office 2003.

A note: in my new job, where we have Win 7 and Office 2012, I am discovering that this event handler (which also does other things) CAN read the name of the original template with pre2007 Word files but can NOT read this info with Word files created with Word 2007 or 2012. This even though the information is there in the XML metadata! (I have a thread about that over in the VBA forum).

In more detail: an autoexec creates the event handler. The event handler determines the name & filepath of the original template and if this is not the "current template" then calls a routine with a long list of CASE tests, each one of which is a template name. For each Case, the file gets remapped to the new workgroup template location.

Is this enough info for you to understand the structure?

**macdonell** · 2012-06-20 21:56

All of the custom templates are stored in folders on the server whose location is specified by the workgroup template location found under file locations. The normal.dot template is never used unless someone is lazy. I do not use the user templates folder location.
I configured the new server computer with the same folder name layout as the original PC had. When I turned the new server online, I merely changed the machine network name of the mapped network drive and Word was directed to the new server.
I discovered that when I turned the old server back on, the searching messages did not appear in the Word window. I cannot leave the original server on as it is going to fail soon.

**macdonell** · 2012-06-20 22:12

to Stylus:
Thank you for the insights. I believe that you are suggesting the solution means writing a VBA macro.
I started using Word 2000 and prided myself by keeping up with reading everything I could find about Word. At that time and since I have been preaching the benefits of Templates and Styles. I cannot recall seeing any references to this Word hiccup though but for the last few years I have shifted my focus to other applications. I guess that is why I have missed this one.
Could you provide a link to your thread in the VBA forum.
Thanks again

**Stylus** · 2012-06-21 04:14

I don't have that many posts - a quick search will find you the thread. However, I didn't go into any detail so there's not much point in reading it.

My current global template runs lots and lots of macros, partly because I built it for Word 2007 which offered no way of customizing the ribbon. If you have little experiences with VBA then my solution may be a bit much.

I recall years ago reading someone describe how they had run a macro that plowed through all the files in a collection and changed the workgroup template filepath in all of them. There may have been a macro posted, so you could Google for it. The advantage for you would be that it would be a one-time operation that would hopefully solve your problem without ongoing macro functions. (The reason I didn't use that approach when I faced the changed-location scenario was that the affected files were spread all over the place, including users' individual drives. A real mess.)

As for "this" Word hiccup... I doubt that any one person knows all the Word gochas!

By the way, when the old server goes to the eternal cloud in the sky, can you rename the new server with the old server's name? You could replicate the entire filepath of the Workgroup Templates location that is stored in each Word file, and that might solve your problem.

**BigMac56** · 2012-06-26 05:36

I've had the same problem and found there are a couple of ways to deal with it.

Easiest way is to do as Stylus suggests - make sure the new server and path name's are identical to the old one.

The second is to remove the "Document Template" name from the "Templates and Add-ins" dialog box. In older versions of windows this was found under "Tools, Options, Templates and Add-ins?" (sorry, I'm guessing the last part). In 2007 and 2010 it's under "Developer, Add-Ins". (See attached)

Open the template, and delete the info that's in blue next to Attach... (it will be highlighted) then resave it. I set up an autonew macro to do this automatically.

Document Template.jpg

**Stylus** · 2012-06-27 09:20

BigMac56

When you remove the document template name in that dialog box, doesn't Word simply replace it with "Normal"?

That's been my experience, and was the reason that I had to construct the elaborate macro remapping structure years ago.

**BigMac56** · 2012-06-27 14:26

Hi Stylus,

Yes it does replace the path and template name with normal, but that's always local, so it solves the problem that Macdonell had of it taking a minute to open while it searched for the old path/template.

As long as there's no reason to stay attached to the original template it solves the problem.

Our office has hundreds of templates, so the best solution for us was to keep the same server and path name, as we did last year. Unfortunately we didn't do this when we upgraded the server in 2002, so there were a few older templates popping up that slowed things down, hence the 2nd solution.

**Stylus** · 2012-06-28 03:32

BigMac56

Macdonell didn't tell us why he wanted to remap to the original templates. There could be content that Macdonell's docs depend on. I found that templates from Word 2003 make styles available to the doc, yet if the pathway to the template is cut, then the doc only has those styles that have already been used in the doc. The remaining styles are out of reach. There is other content like that, for example auto text.

That is the reason I had to get knee-deep in macros when I faced a similar problem.

**BigMac56** · 2012-06-28 08:39

You're right Stylus,

Our templates were fairly simple, no macro's to worry about. The employee's didn't want to re-enter the customer information, so they just opened an old document, made a couple of changes and resaved it under a new name. This caused enough headaches when they forgot to change the name and overwrote the old document.

Thanks for the clarification.

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