Hi Suzanne,
If you read the two articles I suggested, I think they make it clearer than
I can how Word works, so I'll defer many of your questions to them, repost
if necessary.
But see below.
I don't think I made it clear. I have already asked each user to drag a
copy of the Normal template that I made onto their own hard drives
and into the Templates folder. It works great.
Yeah, it works great until Normal corrupts, then you have to redo it. Or
until you decide everyone needs a third macro and want to do it again, and
then people who added more customizations to their Normal in the meantime
are unhappy because you just overrode their customized Normal. It's doable,
just not best practice.
When you say "into the Templates folder"--did you name the file Normal? Did
it replace the existing Normal? How did you create the template in the
first place?
How can I get the macros
I've written to "follow" the new Normal template everyone's going to be
using--once they drag it from my shared folder onto their hard drives?
Macros don't really follow a template. They are saved in the template file,
the template acts as a container for them. You can use *either* a template
to install the macros somewhere, *or* use the Organizer to copy them from
template to template, but you don't need to do both. If you overrode
everyone's Normal template with your created Normal template, then you don't
need to mess with the Organizer at all. If you put your created template in
the Word Startup folder to make it a global template, you don't need to mess
with the Organizer at all. Word will automatically load the macros from
either Normal or any global template.
The Organizer only shows the contents of Normal, or templates that have
specifically been opened. Word will load and run macros in global templates
even if they do not show up in the Organizer because the global template is
closed.
Another possibility is that Word doesn't recognize anything pretending to be
Normal if Word didn't create it itself. Normal has special qualities,
creating a template and naming it Normal isn't the same as creating a Normal
template--though if you took your Word-generated Normal template and copied
it onto everyone's hard drive, Word would recognize that as a Normal (though
as I said, that's not a great long-term idea).
It's also possible that when you created the macros, they got saved into
your Normal (as is the default setting) and are not actually in the template
you are passing around, if that's a template you created from scratch.
Since I'm not clear on what you actually did, I can't quite say what the
problem is, but hopefully that and the suggested articles give you an
understanding of how it all fits together, at least to let you direct your
questions more specifically.
I'm afraid the macros do need to be part of the Normal template for
each user. It's just the way we have to have it set up in order that
our documents are consistent for the art department.
Normal has two separate tasks--to hold customizatons so that they are
available everywhere, and as a basis for new documents. If you want new
documents formatted in a certain way, then you have good reason for
demanding Normal have certain margins, certain default font, etc. But
putting macros in a global template instead of Normal still makes them
available everywhere to be used, and makes no difference to the consistency
of the document. I guess an AutoNew or AutoOpen macro might need to be kept
in Normal (I'll have to test that myself), but not any macro that provides
functions triggered after the fact.
Some lingo: Global templates are templates that are available
everywhere--Normal is a special type of global template. You can make
templates global by putting them in the Word Startup folder, OR by adding
the file, wherever it is, as a Global template via the Tools | Templates and
Add-ins dialog. If you look at the dialog that will make more sense.
Templates in the Templates folder are not global templates, except for
Normal.
Hope that helps,
DM