Yep
Well done!
That's the solution we have been recommending in here for a month, too.
When installed, Word 2008 can import corrupt settings from the Office 2004
or Office X templates. You have to get them out of sight, or you get a bad
install.
The issue is that when Word starts, it looks for all its preference files,
including Normal.dotm. If it finds them, it uses what it finds.
If it doesn't find one or more, it will create them.
New in Word 2008 is the function that looks for, and imports, settings from
the Word X or Word 2004 Normal templates and preferences, if they exist.
Since the Word 2004 templates and preferences can contain customisations,
and the Word 2008 one can't contain VBA, everything gets screwed up at that
point.
Now: All the files in question are "user-created" files. They are not on
the DVD. So they are not replaced if you re-install. Which is why a
re-install never fixes anything on the Mac.
In fact, it should take no action at all. If you run the installer, it
should discover that every file it is trying to write already exists and is
not older that the version it is trying to write. So the Installer should
just quit without doing anything.
The only time a re-install will do anything, is after you run the Remove
Office tool, which will then delete all of the Office component files,
enabling you to roll back to the original Released to Manufacture version.
If you do that, you must remember to re-apply any updates you may have
applied.
Hope this helps
I found a solution to this problem on my computer (Macbook Pro). After I
installed Office 2008, every time I closed Word I got this same error
message. I uninstalled the program and reinstallled it several times. Made
no difference. I I called Microsoft but the support engineer's suggestions
to remove various files and folders made no difference. I removed and
reinstalled the program yet again. I had by now become convinced through
reading online in different places but also in this post that the problem had
to do with the Normal.dotm and with template issues in general. I used My
Mac's Spotlight program to hunt for all files with the word Normal, by just
typing "normal." This led me to several locations, including the following:
Users/"my name"/Documents/Microsoft User Data. There I found some files with
"normal" in their name or just simply labeled "normal." I renamed those
files to something else (e.g., "wrongnormal"). I then rebooted the computer,
reopened and closed Word, and the error message was gone. The program now
saves the new normal template, "Normal.dotm." I can also create new templates
and everything seems to work fine. I would like to know if this is helpful
for other users as well.
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
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