Autotext restore?

[Kris - Idaho]

Running Word 2002 which regularly "hung" and "need to close" message were
followed by error reporting. I followed multiple suggestions from this
Discussion Group, which were helpful and worked. I did use instructions,
which were excellent from Solving Crashing Problems and When Word Crashes"
(gmayor) . Unfortunately in the process (didn't realize it until today) my
Normal.dot with hundreds of entries was replaced with the standard
normal.doc.
Is there any way to recover my customized normal.doc? No other template is
currently available in Word.
Windows XP Pro and I did not reinstall Word, if that is something you will
want to know.

 

[Kris - Idaho]

Found it! But next question:
I just located my 'missing' Normal.dot in user\application
data\Microsoft\templates, after cleaning up Word 2002. I can see it 2,929 KB
as a Word Backup Document but I don't know how to restore it as my normal.doc
Autotext.

Anyone out there who can help? I will be eternally grateful. . .

 

[Terry Farrell]

Kris

It is best practice to keep normal.dot as clean as possible (faster opening
and less chance of corruptions). If you save all your customisations such as
AutoText, Toolbars and macros in a new template (call it mycustom.dot) and
then put that template in the Word Startup folder, the customisations will
be available globally (i.e. to all documents on your computer).

When you 'cleaned up Word', did you rename normal.dot as normal.bad (we
don't normally advise anyone to delete normal.dot)? If so, you can use the
Organizer to copy the AutoText from normal.bad into a new template.

 

[Kris - Idaho]

Hi Terry,
Unfortunately I didn't rename the normal.dot - - I didn't realize that it
would to be replaced in the automatic steps. I used the Troubleshoot Utility
in Word 2002 support.
I finally figured out (in hindsight) that the size of my autotext file was
probably the reason for the original slowness so I have deleted many of the
large entries from it (the normal.dot from before the clean-up). It is now
considererably smaller and I want to replaced the normal.doc with it, but I'm
having formatting problems with a lot of the inserted autotext entries when I
try to insert them into a new document.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Large AutoTexts will be OK if you save them to a separate template and place
it in the Startup folder. Theoretically, you can have many templates in the
Startup folder, so you can spread your large AutoTexts over several
templates, which should ensure that the corruption problem is minimal and
less cataclysmic! Though templates in the Startup folder will slow down
Word's launch, it should be too significant and only slows it down on the
first opening, not for opening subsequent documents.

Terry

 

[Kris - Idaho]

Terry,
"Cataclysmic" was an excellent describption of my situation. Thank you - you
have just saved me untold hours of frustration. later. . .kris : )