Sharing Quick Parts

Question

I've made several useful quick parts that I want to share with my colleagues. They're currently saved in my normal.dotm. I've considered saving my normal.dotm as a .dot template and putting it in a networked folder, and pointing everyone's Word startup folder to that location. And I've considered saving my normal.dotm as a .dot template and emailing it to my colleages, but I'm not sure how they'd then make the quick parts from the template available to all their documents.

What is the easiest way to share quick parts? Am I on the right track?

And here's a subsidiary question: I recently tested out changing the location of the word startup folder for a colleague, and noticed that some (not all) of the quick parts had formatting changes. Any idea why that happened?

Answer 1

Quick Parts must be stored in templates.

Normal.dotm is not designed to be shared. It should not be shared!

You can create and save a new template. If it need not have macros, it can be a .dotx template rather than a .dotm template.

You can copy / move your quickparts to that template using the Organizer Enhanced Tools from Greg Maxey's site. Building Blocks & AutoText

No idea why there would be formatting changes unless the quick parts were to be stored in the Startup Folder  and were not there or were duplicated in a different location.

Quickparts are normally stored in:

the Quick Parts file (name and location depends on Word Version)

A global template stored in the Word Startup Folder

the Normal.dotm file

a document's attached template

A template holding quickparts can also have QAT modifications to access those quickparts. You would want to make sure that these modifications were stored in that template.

Automated Boilerplate Using Microsoft Word

Answer 2

The Building Blocks Enhanced Tools Add-In mentioned in this thread has been updated and replaced with Building Blocks Add-In.  See:  http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/word_tip_pages/building_blocks_autotext.html

Answer 3

This likely has to do with the bold setting on a Style which is used in your quick parts. Bold is a toggle setting. It may be that the style is based on another style that exists in both your template and in the receiving person's computer. On your computer, in your template, that base style may be bold and the style in your quick part toggles the bold setting from the base style to off. When it comes onto the other person's computer, it toggles the (non-bold) base style to turn bold on. Or, the base might not be bold on your computer and be bold on the recipient computer.

See Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word and How Styles in Microsoft Word Cascade by Shauna Kelly, MVP.

Check the styles used in your Quick Parts and have them not based on other styles that could exist in documents where they will be used.

Answer 4

I'm trying to finalize my template, but I've run into problems with the formatting of the quick parts.

I mentioned in my initial question that when I tried sharing the quick parts I'd made with a colleague, I noticed some formatting changes. Well, I've deleted those quick parts and made some new ones from scratch and I'm still seeing formatting changes.

Specifically, after saving the document that contains the quick parts as a template (.dotx), closing the template, and then opening a new document from the template, all of the quick parts are now set in bold. There was absolutely no bold in any of them when they were created--and saved.

I have no idea why this is happening. Any thoughts?