serious word template issue in Word 2003

[Michael]

We are testing Office 2003 and have encountered the following serious issue
with Word templates.

Our current Word version is 2002.
We have a suite of company templates installed on users' PCs.
These are used to create numerous standard documents which are also used as
templates - e.g. Letter of Offer.doc based on, say, Letter.dot (that is,
Letter.dot is the template attached to Letter of Offer.doc).

In Word 2002, when launching a new document from Letter of Offer.doc, the
macros, userforms etc in Letter.dot would be available (e.g. a userform
fired from Document_New event), and the new document would be attached to
Letter.dot.

In Word 2003, the macros, userforms etc in Letter.dot are only available
when a new document created from Letter of Offer.doc. After closing and
reopening a new document, the attached template is Letter of Offer.doc, not
Letter.dot as expected - so no macros, toolbars etc are available.

This is a critical issue for us. Has anyone else run into this one yet????

Any help much appreciated.

 

[Jim F]

Michael,

We had are have the same issue. Read MSDN article 823372. This article
provides a work around and a hot fix. In our situation neither the work
around or hotfix were suitable. We think we narrowed the issue down to an
Office Update (KB887979). we will not have our testing results back on that
theroy until later this afternoon.

One temporary fix could be to add the template to the office startup folder
which I perfer over the work around provided in article 823372.

let me know if this helps and or if you find a better solution.

 

[Jim F]

Good news....bad news.

Through testing we have determined that Office Patch KB887979 does infact
cause the problem. Microsofts attempt to close some security holes and fix
office SP1 casued more problems. The bad news is that the hotfix MS provides
does not work worth a damn and the only way to unistall the office Patch is
to Unistall office completly...to include removing any office folder that are
left behind after the install...and then reinstall Office.

Hope this will save you some time. I will be in contact with MS later today
to see if they can provide a better way to fix this problem.

 

[Michael]

Thanks Jim - will follow up and post back if we can fix it.

 

[Michael]

Thanks again for your help Jim - because we are running out of time and we
have a function in our global template to "show form" - ie show the
template's dialog box, I'm going to use that to enable a template
re-attachment.

I note that to set the attached template you need to do BOTH of:

ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate = ...path\filename
ActiveDocument.BuiltinDocumentProperties(wdPropertyTemplate) = filename

If you don't (and only do the first line) the template is only temporarily
attached (save the doc and it is lost).

Did you get any joy from MS???

Cheers

Michael

 

[Jim F]

Michael,

We were on the phone with Microsoft for 2 hours and were esculated to level
3 support. They are supposed to call back in the next few days. I will let
you know what they have to say.

Jim F

 

[Michael]

Just for the record, we have also tested with Office 2003 on our SOE and can
confirm that patch KB887979 is the culprit.

 

[Jim F]

On Tuesday, I had a phone conference with Microsoft without resolution. I
have another phone conference with them again today. I gave them a link to
this Thread so someone from Microsoft may contact you to get another
perspective on the situation.

 

[Michael]

adding an autonew macro as follows fixes the issue:

Sub AutoNew
Dim sTemplateFullName as String
sTemplateFullName = ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate.FullName
ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate = NormalTemplate.FullName
ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate = sTemplateFullName
End Sub