Backing up Word

[Sam Lewis]

Hi to everyone,

I wish to find out ways of backing up Office Word 2003 professional. In
particular I would like to be able to manually backup my custom templates,
auto text macros, other macros if this is possible. I would also like to
keep such data off the C. drive in case I need to format.

Are there any other areas that people routinely backup such as settings and
configurations?

Thanks in advance

Sam

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/FilesToBackup.htm

 

[Sam Lewis]

Thanks Suzanne

I have read the link and the associated article "what do templates and
add-ins store". These articles seem to refer to earlier versions of Word
(prior to 2003) which may have thrown me a bit. For example User templates
in Word 2003 did not appear to be stored in the start-up folder. At any
rate I was able to find them and relocate them to be stored on a separate
physical drive. It seems that the normal.dot was also moved to this new
location. If so, this is great as I will be able to easily back them up
manually and to preserve them should I format the C. drive etc.

Some confusion with regards the use of the normal.dot. I gather from the
articles that things like auto text macros such as boilerplate text or
macros such as pressing F10 to jump to the next insertion point are stored
within whatever template you have created them in. So if you backup this
template you are effectively backing up your macros, auto text,
customisations etc

If I am understanding the article correctly you are suggesting NOT to create
these within normal.dot. However, these sorts of boilerplates and macros I
would like to have truly globally available to all my documents. I imagine
you would achieve this by creating them within normal.dot? On the other
hand I understand that if you are creating a specific user templates e.g.
for a fax, then this would not be added to normal.dot but you would still
start off using normal.dot and simply "save as" fax.dot or whatever.

Sorry for my confusion

Sam

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

User templates are not stored in the Startup folder unless they are intended
to be global. Global templates, like Normal.dot, can supply macros,
AutoText, toolbars, and the like (but not styles or document layout) to all
documents, regardless of what template they are based on. I imagine that the
suggestion made in the article (which I did not write) is that instead of
just moving your current Normal.dot to a new computer, you copy its
customizations to a global template in your Startup folder and leave the
default Normal.dot alone (especially if you are upgrading to a higher
version).