Problem opening new word document

H

haleabug

We just installed Office Home and Student 2008 on my daughter's Mac and each time she tries to open a new word document, a copy of a previous document she created when using the trial Office version opens. The only way she is able to get a blank page is if she deletes the text of her previous document. I have deleted the previous document from her document file but it still opens each time we try to create a new document. Any ideas what could be going on?
 
B

Beth Rosengard

I can tell you how to clear that text but the fact is that you should have
removed the trial version (of Office 2004, right?, since there isn't one for
Office 2008 yet) before installing *any* version of Office.

All new documents are based on the Normal template. Apparently, Word 2008
is accessing the Word 2004 Normal template from the trial version and I'm
not sure you can stop it doing that without removing both the trial version
and the old Normal. So ...

Quit all Office applications.

Open the Remove Office tool (Applications>Microsoft Office 2008>Additional
Tools> Remove Office).

Run it and choose to remove all versions of Office except 2008. Empty the
trash.

Now, do a computer-wide search for all instances of documents called Normal
and/or Normal.dotm. Trash them (I'm assuming you haven't done any
customizing other than changing basic defaults like the font; if you have,
drag them to the desktop instead and read up about Restoring Customizations
at the link below).

Be sure you have the ones in these two locations (but if you find any
others, get rid of them too):

Word 2008: ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User
Templates/Normal.dotm

Word 2004: ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Normal

Launch Word 2008 which will automatically create a new Normal template. You
will have to reset any defaults (like font, font size, etc.).

See here for more info: <http://word.mvps.org/Mac/MacWordNormal.html>

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/Mac/WordMacHome.html>
My Site: <http://www.bethrosengard.com>
 

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