Some Clarification With Saving Settings in Word 2003 ?

[Magnusfarce]

I've just rebuilt my system which is based on W2k and uses Office 2003.
I've just reviewed the same old Google and MS-MVP articles I collected last
time and find myself just as confused as ever about how to save and bring
forward Word settings for dictionary, macros, and autocorrect items. I'm
one of the legion of Word users who needs a reasonable amount of
functionality but cannot afford the time to make second career of Word.

For example,

Some articles say not to rely on normal.dot because it is easily
corruptable, but I'm not up to using templates at this time, so that's not
the best option.

One of my problems is that many of the Google discussions and MS articles on
these subjects refer to various versions of Word in different OS's, and all
the rules seem to change from version to version. (Certainly, some of the
file locations change with the operating system, although I can't blame that
on Word. I guess.)

Some users seem to think that the "Save My Settings Wizard" is not a
reliable way to do what I want to do.


Can someone either describe to me where the pertinent files reside so that I
can simply do my own updates when I need to? (These used to be simple
things like normal.dot and custom.dic) This approach would allow me to
keep my laptop and my wife's computer up to date much more easily. I'm at a
point where I would much rather do these things manually than use any
built-in, automated function.

If I need to make fundamental changes in how I work, i.e., start using
templates in a very basic way, ok then, but I'll do it only grudgingly
because of the learning curve. There needs to be a strong benefit for doing
this.

Sorry to bring up an issue that probably gets beaten to death, but I have
yet to see any solutions that seem clear enough to be useful. BTW, I'm
close to being a rocket scientist in my regular work and I find it
frustrating to be so easily confused so often about all this. Overall, Word
is a useful and powerful program, but sometimes doing (what should be) easy
things can be a real pain in the butt. I'm sure I'm not alone in these
feelings.

To be very specific, for the items mentioned earlier (dictionary, macros,
and autocorrect items) in what files are these info stored and where are
they located in Win2k and Word 2003? As well, is there any problem simply
overwriting each of these files with newer versions to update another
machine with Word 2003? I have access to the files on the previous HDD,
but I am tempted to start over with new autocorrect and dictionay items just
to avoid any corruption issues.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

- Magnusfarce

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Magnus,

I'm sure you'll get lots of replies to your request! This is a favorite
topic around the Word campfire.

General recommendations:

1) Read http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/FilesToBackup.htm. As it says
there, you can use the Save My Settings wizard. The only thing of interest
to you that it doesn't handle is the ACL files, and there's a link in the
article (under "AutoCorrect Entries") to a page where you can download a
utility to do that.

2) The article at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/WhatTemplatesStore.htm (also linked
from the previous page) describes how to find the User Templates folder,
which is where Normal.dot lives. It can indeed be different for each
combination of Word version and Windows version and can be modified in each
installation, so all we can do is describe a procedure.

3) Yes, you can live your whole life in Word with no templates other than
Normal.dot. You'll be missing out on some of the power of Word to make
certain document types easier to create; but if that isn't as important to
you as simplicity, that's fine. Just be careful about backups -- not because
Normal.dot is especially prone to corruption, because in my experience it is
not; but because stuff happens -- e.g. my hard drive crashed a few weeks
ago, but I didn't lose any customizations because I had backups.

If you ever decide to create a template or two -- and that's worth the
trouble for document types that you create frequently -- see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart1.htm and
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm for advice.

4) In most cases you can take W2K files such as Normal.dot and custom.dic
iinto Word 2003 without so much as a burp. (It might not work so well in the
other direction, as there can be features you used in the later version that
don't exist in the earlier program.) The custom dictionary in particular is
just a text file. There's no problem overwriting the same-named files
created by the Word 2003 installer. On the other hand, many settings are
stored in the registry, and the only reasonable method of moving them is
something like the Save My Settings wizard.