Changing the attached template location

[Chris Wilkinson]

hi,

We recently moved all our company documents to a new server. Now any of them
that were based on templates on the old server take about 5-10 minutes to
open. I looked in tools>templates and addins... and sure enough all the
problem documents all point to the old server e.g. \\olderserver\template.dot
for the Document Template. Is there any way of changing the Document Template
Location without opening the file? If you right-click the document and go
into the detailed summary, you can see the Document Template name (and lots
of other properties which you can changed) but cannot change it. This leads
me to believe that it is possible to change the metadata of a Word document
without having to open it. I estimate that it will be a weeks work to
manually check and change every company document so I am desperately looking
for antoher way.

All help would be much appreciated,
Chris

 

[DeanH]

Try looking in Tools, Options, File Locations, User Templates for a location
that can be modified.
Hope this helps
DeanH

 

[Tony Jollans]

You cannot change the document template without opening the document but
understanding how it's used may help you find a solution. The template has a
name and a path and the document itself has a name and a path, The first
place in which Word looks for a template is: document path/template name.

If you have many documents in many different places with many different
templates you may have quite a job on your hands but one way to address this
network issue is to create temporary templates with appropriate names in the
folders with the documents. These temporary templates could be copies of the
originals or they could be dummies just for one purpose. The purpose of
these templates is to allow speedy opening of affected documents and then to
change the attached template to its new location - with a simple autoopen
macro - or a batch process to do them all at once.

 

[Terry Farrell]

The solution is to use Windows Server Redirect command so that all requests
for oldserver\template are redirected to the new location. If you need
further information on the Redirect command, check out the appropriate
Server newsgroup.