Hi Norm:
Templates can be (in Mac Word, usually are...) global.
There are three kinds of templates: Global, Add-in, and Attached.
A Global template is anything that is in the Word STARTUP folder, plus the
Normal Template. These are loaded at Application Start and available to any
open document.
An Add-in is a template or linked code module called programmatically and
available to nominated documents. At the Stock Exchange, we had a
departmental spelling dictionary I used to maintain that was available to
any "official" documents our users had open.
An Attached template is either the template from which a document was
created (the Template will remain attached if it is available) or a template
that has been explicitly attached to the document by the user.
The contents of an Attached template are available only to the document to
which the template is attached, but there can be a lot of those. At Rio
Tinto every one of the half-a-million work instructions was attached to one
of three templates, depending on what kind of work instruction it was.
Word has a class of things called "Command Bars", of which toolbars are one
kind, the Formatting Palette is another.
What Clive is saying is that there are two kinds of CommandBars, "Custom",
and "BuiltIn". There are 20 built-in toolbars: Standard and Formatting are
the most common.
Word will not allow built-in toolbars to be copied between templates.
There are two ways of working with templates. Clive is describing the
Professional way, where a company has many different templates for different
purposes, and places those templates in network template folders so users
can create each kind of document by double-clicking the template.
To work that way, you must create toolbars of your own, named differently
from the built-in set. One of the reasons is so you can copy those toolbars
from one template to another.
Unfortunately, Microsoft Office was designed in a gentler, simpler time
before Internet worms that could put your company out of business in 7.5
seconds were invented. Its security mechanisms are just not up to the task.
As a result, professional use of templates is nearly impossible these days.
I don't even bother teaching it any longer, except in professional
workgroups.
I now advise users to keep everything in Normal template, and effectively
that's what I do myself. Doing this means customisations will automatically
be accessible to all open documents. Which means you do not need to bother
creating your own toolbars, because you can simply customise the built-in
set.
This has two advantages: It means that your customisations are
automatically visible in any document you open, that means that the toolbars
you customise are the defaults, which will appear and disappear in
context-sensitive manner. All automatic!
But it DOES mean that your Normal.dotm becomes increasingly valuable over
time, and MUST be backed up! There is 17 years' of development effort in my
Normal.dotm, it's worth $850,000. Hate to lose it...
I suggest that you approach the rest of your question in three steps:
1) Accept for the moment that all your customisations are in Normal.dotm,
and you have no reason yet to change that. Learn to bend Normal to your
will.
2) Start trying to understand which settings are global and which are
per-document. Read the Word preferences carefully; Word 2008 is much
better at telling you which settings apply "to the current document only".
3) When you are comfortable with this level of detail, and when you have
bought a copy of Word 2010, come back to this question. At that stage, you
will be ready to start on VBA. And when you are, you will need to rapidly
learn about Object Orientation, Context, and Inheritance.
Just to get you thinking along those lines:
"Object Orientation" means that Word works by manipulating "Objects", such
as Documents, Paragraphs, Toolbars and Styles. Objects is another word for
"things". An Object has "properties": things that it is, and "methods",
things that it does. A paragraph is an object, the selection within it is a
property, and "delete" is a method.
"Context" means that an Object Oriented application is like a set of Chinese
Eggs, with the Internet as the outer-most egg, the Computer inside it, OS X
inside that, Word inside that, the Normal Template, the Document, The
Section, the Paragraph, all the way down to the Insertion Point.
"Inheritance" means that properties are inherited down the context chain but
not up. So from Computer to OS X, from OS X to Word, from Word to the
Document. But not from the Paragraph to the document. Not from the
Document to Word.
Just turn these things over in your mind: understanding object orientation
and inheritance is the key to getting the most out of Word.
Cheers
I'm "Bending... " my Word 2008 as I read Clive's document "Bend Word to
your Will."
I don't understand what Word stores in templates and what is global.
As such, I do not fully understand Clive's comment (Bend, pg 46) that
follows:
When I open my templates, they all seem to have the same modified
toolbars. But I read the above as saying that only the normal template
would have this toolbar. Obviously, I'm misreading it.
Appreciate any help with understanding the how and where of the storing
of the different modifications (preferences, menus, toolbars, etc) to
Word and thus what is universal and what is template dependent. I think
a key concept that I'm missing. Hope that question is clear.
Thank you in advance.
--
This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
[email protected]