... most users passionately hate being treated like that....

Seconded.

If your, or any other IT department, tried to overwrite my Normal.dot I
would build my own process to make sure I got it back. I have been fighting
this total failure of IT departments to understand users since the days of
mainframes - they couldn't impose central control over designed-in user
customization facilities then and they can't do it now - and trying to do so
shows ignorance and arrogance.

--
Enjoy,
Tony

"John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]" wrote in
message ...
Hi Jacqueline:

I would say your firm has it close to exactly correct.

My only quibble would be that each time you copy Normal.dot in, you blow
away all of the users' carefully-created customisations :-) I doubt if
that
would do much for staff morale -- most users passionately hate being
treated
like that.

However, apart from destroying staff morale, "technically" your method is
exactly correct. The Normal template is designed and intended to be the
blank document, and to be used as such.

The method you are using is dramatically simpler to code, administer, and
maintain! And very reliable.

I don't know what you've been reading, but I think I would throw it in the
round file :-)

If your firm is a heavy user of macros and toolbars, you might "consider"
putting those in a global add-in. You can administer that exactly the
same
way: put it on the network and copy it to the user's Word/Startup folder
each time you update it.

In your situation, there's no real benefit in doing this, other than the
fact that a global add-in is not subject to constant change by normal Word
usage, so it will last longer between "damages". It would also mean you
did
not need to blow the user's customisations away every morning :-)

Hope this helps

On 14/3/06 9:57 PM, in article
, "Jacqueline"
wrote:

I have been involved in several discussions regarding this recently and
would like to try and clear this up. My firm hold the normal.dot (and
all other templates) in a central templates folder on our network.
Each user has a copy on their C drive which updates every day when they
log on. This means if the network crashes they can still work with
their template(s). Normal.dot contains all of our macros, styles,
autotexts etc. When I update I simply update the master version and
this is replicated to each pc. This means if a user's normal.dot gets
damaged it can be copied from the master, and if something goes wrong
with the master I can copy my (or someone else's c drive version).

This seems to work well but everything I read tells me we shouldn't use
normal.dot as our blank document - can anyone tell me a good reason
why we should change?

thanks


--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410