Hi Mike:
Word will indeed create a brand new Normal template if it cannot find one,
so you definitely have one somewhere, and Word knows where it is.
It's probably in your Trash. Mac OS has a bug where deleted items that go
into the Trash can remain in use. Quit Word (not just minimise it) and
empty your Trash. When you next start Word, it will create a new Normal
template.
In Word 2004, your Normal template is not supposed to be in "Templates".
It's supposed to be in the Microsoft User Data folder. I, among others,
strongly requested this change because Normal template should be private to
each user. Very difficult problems (such as the one you are having) result
if more than one user can get edit access to Normal template at a time. And
lots of crashes result if a user cannot get edit access to the normal
template.
As to your problem, while replacing Normal template will probably fix it, I
would like you to just check in Preferences to ensure that in View you have
NOT specified Draft Font. If that is set to ON, you are limited to only one
simplified screen font.
Draft font is a power-saving measure that is a hangover from the days when
computers were very feeble. It limits Word to using only one font, which is
simplified and all of the glyphs are pre-built in memory so Word only has to
display them instead of drawing each one in its correct position. It
provides quite a speed boost on an under-powered computer, but it's not
really necessary these days. The reason we still have it is because it
winds its way through the 30 million lines of code in Office and it's a
major project to get it out!
Since we changed from Apple's QuickDraw display to ATSUI in Word 2004, some
people may again find a use for Draft Font in very long documents. ATSUI is
around 20 or 30 per cent slower to draw the screen under some circumstances.
Personally, I would rather add more horsepower to the computer when Word
gets too slow: you can use that extra power for other things apart from
speeding Word up
I find Word 2004 performance very good for normal-sized documents (those
under 100 pages) on a 1 GHz G4 with only 256 MB of memory. As soon as my
general manager and financial nay-sayer can be talked into it, I will throw
another 1 GB of memory into this iBook and Word will just take off
Cheers
I don't recall that I did anything special in Word X with Panther OS but
suddenly my "Normal" view gives me only a text file that is un-editable. I
have looked everywhere the "Normal" template is and the qualities are
right--font, size, etc.--but when calling up a new document in Normal view,
I can only type one small font and do nothing with it. Everything works fine
in "Page Layout" view, but I prefer to use Normal. How can I restore the
Normal template and function? (Perhaps by mistake, but reading that Word
would apply the default Normal template if it couldn't find the Normal file, I
tossed the old Normal file from Templates. How do I get back to normal?
Thanks
Mike
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
