Template question - Customising Normal.dot across organisation

[Jess]

I was wondering if I gave you a scenario what would be the best solution?

Aim: Our organisation has had difficulty with keeping record of what
document came from where after being printed. Their solution was to ensure
that everyone’s normal.dot included a footer stating the location and name of
the document.

Solution: Already having been implemented, we created a customised
normal.dot we were happy with (font Arial size 10, and a footer with folder
location and document name in size 8 at the bottom) including the auto text
and other macros available in the normal.dot. This version was then copied to
a server. At user logon a script is run that copies the normal.dot from the
server in to the users application data and forces them to use the company
normal.dot

This has worked overall, but has proven not to be the grand solution due to
the issues faced below:
1.) Major problem: If a user customises the toolbar, or adds their own
Auto-text to their liking, it is removed once they logoff or restart. Proving
to be extremely frustrating for avid users.
2.) Minor problem: For the customised normal.dot, where a toolbar is in view
already, it is not ticked on the Toolbars list. If we tick it, we get two of
these kinds of toolbars. (this is no big deal, but also not ideal). We are
sure this can be rectified by editing the Normal.dot more appropriately next
time.

We can overcome Major problem #1 by altering our VBScript to tell if the
normal.dot file is dated a certain date, not to overwrite, thus keeping the
user’s customised version in tact at next logon, but this is not ideal and we
are sure there is a better way of ensuring the Company’s need of the footer
and fonts in the normal.dot for all existing and new users logging on to
machines.

I have searched for ‘customising global.dot’ or ‘customising normal.dot
globally’ but I cannot find a solution. I have also looked in to the Office
2003 Administrative template policies service pack 3 – but I cannot see where
I can set a footer and default font and font size within the word template.

Once we do find a solution that works globally, my only concern is what to
do in the event the normal.dot template becomes corrupt, what the options are
for each user. It would be great to have our customised normal.dot to be
automatically created when the older one becomes corrupt, but not sure if
Microsoft’s program can be configured in such a way.

We are currently working with MS Office 2003 service pack 3, but will be
upgrading in a year’s time and will need to keep our eyes open for the fix in
the next version we deploy (likely to be Office 2007/8)

I look forward to any hints or tips or solutions you can provide, in the
mean time I will keep looking around and testing out other solutions.

 

[Graham Mayor]

I would imagine that it would be extremely irritating to be employed as a
Word user in your organisation. Forcing users to work in this way is
stifling to creativity and productivity, and adding a footer to the normal
template will ruin the possibility of using Word to create labels. This is
not the way the normal template is supposed to be used - though sadly many
organisations do use it in this manner ... and worse .

If you want users to adopt company standards then create document templates
and train the users to use those document templates for the types of
documents they apply to. Thus you can maintain a handful of standard
templates which the users are not going to screw up, stored at a shared
server location. The normal template can then be used as the user
personalisation tool it was always intended to be.

If it was only the footer issue that was bothering you then you could create
macros in an add-in template to intercept the FileSave and FileSaveAs
command and provide the option to add the footer to the document. - or even
give the users a toolbar button to add the footer eg something along the
lines of:

Sub AddfNameToFooter()
Dim oSection As Section
Dim oFooter As HeaderFooter
Dim oRng As Range
Dim sQuery As String
If Len(ActiveDocument.Path) = 0 Then
ActiveDocument.Save
End If
sQuery = MsgBox("Add filename to footer?", vbYesNo, "Filename")
If sQuery = vbYes Then
For Each oSection In ActiveDocument.Sections
For Each oFooter In oSection.Footers
If oFooter.Exists Then
Set oRng = oFooter.Range
With oRng
.Fields.Add oRng, wdFieldFileName, "\p"
.Font.name = "Arial"
.Font.Size = "10"
.Paragraphs.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphRight
.Fields.Update
End With
End If
Next oFooter
Next oSection
ActiveDocument.Save
End If
End sub


--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Jess]

Hi Graham

I do agree with you, that it should not be forced, however it has been a
decision made from the top! (as the usual story goes..) we can only wait and
see what other problems arise out of replacing normal.dot on everyone's
machine. But we are not completely restricting user's creativity or
productivity. The font can be changed and they can remove the footer if they
wish.

However, I do like your idea at prompting users durign the File Save/Save as
command. I will test it and see how it goes. I can only see 1 issue with
this, is that when the footer is added it will cause problems to the margins
the user has set, making words overlap to other pages. (especially if the
file location is in several folders, which causes the footer to go over 2 or
3 lines..)

Thanks very much for your reply.

Has any used GP to distribute customised normal.dot to your org?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The creativity and productivity angles Graham referred to have more to do
with customizing toolbars, menus, etc. Presumably this could be done with a
global add-in in each user's Startup folder, but that requires user
education, as most will save customizations to Normal.dot (the default), and
they will then be wiped out each time they log on.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Jess]

Hi Suzanne

I see, understood. We will definitely solve that problem as it is completely
unreasonable which is why I posted here in the first place.

I was hoping to get someone who's done this via Group Policy, rather than
having to write a macros event.

Thank you to Graham
I tested your script and it works, but I feel everytime someone opts to save
a document that pop up would be immensely frustrating. A user can save 1
document several times whilst editing.

Best Regards
Jessica