Word cannot save changes to the Normal template

Question

We are all familiar with the fact that some changes to word documents provoke changes in the Normal Template. Thus when we close Word, we are asked if we want to save the changes to Normal. I've been using Word since it was a DOS-only product i.e. before first release of Windows, so this is very familiar.

But, as of today, Word is unable to save the Normal template because of a "file permission error". I do have permission to access the templates folder (it is within My Documents, or perhaps I should call it Documents, because I am on Windows 10). There was no problem yesterday!

A number of people have asked questions like this, but not exactly like this. Can you help?

Ron

Answer 1

OK, I didn't figure on you changing the location. In fact, I have a similar setup, but with separate Templates folders for the several side-by-side Office versions that I have.

I'll suggest some troubleshooting steps, with apologies if you've already tried them.

If you open Normal.dotm itself, rather than a document based on it, and make a change there, do you get the same error message when you try to save it?

If you move the Normal.dotm file temporarily to another folder and restart Word, make a change that should be saved in the template, then shut down Word, does a new Normal.dotm file get saved in your Templates folder? If so, you can use the Organizer to copy styles and macros from the old template to the new one.

If you move the Normal.dotm file to another folder, and change Word's File > Options > Advanced > File Locations dialog to match, do you still get the error message on saving a change in the template? Do you get different results if the location is outside your Documents folder, and/or outside your profile (that is, not under C:\Users\Ron)?

Answer 2

I spoke to Microsoft support about this and this is the fix he gave me which so far seems to have worked.

First, the issue is there are 2 versions of office keys installed. 

Open CMD as an Administrator 

2. cd C:\Program Files \Microsoft Office\Office16
3. cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus --shows all licenses installed
4. cscript ospp.vbs /unpkey:xxxxxx --deletes license by last 5 keys which you will get from previous         command.
5. Open Word 2016 and follow activation steps. 
6. Run 'cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus' to verify that the license is Activated.

I hope this helps.

Answer 3

Jay, Thank you again. I tried opening Normal.dotm, adding a new style and saving it. This worked. I was then able to create a new document based on Normal.dotm: the new style was there just as it should have been.

Before trying your second diagnostic measure a thought occurred to me. The original problem arose when I was developing and running a mail-merge. This necessitated some formatting of the data (which had been extracted from Excel) after the merge had run.  The mail-merge document was itself a custom template. The problem of "unable to save" arose when I had coded the reformatting steps into a macro to be saved with the mail-merge form document. I had also created two new styles in the mail-merge template.

I have now run this again, using an ordinary .docm instead of .dotm as the mail-merge form. It works perfectly. I have not managed to explain to myself how Normal.dotm became involved in this. But even now there are thing to do with the normal template (and styles) that are not clear to me, so I guess that my ideas about custom templates are either out of date (or were always wrong!).

Let's consider this one dead.

Regards,

Ron

Answer 4

Thanks for replying so quickly, Jay.

I assume you mean (in my case) C:\Users\Ron\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates. There is no current template in there. Instead just a couple of ~files, as you can see from this.

The last-update was before I moved to W10.

But in "my" folder for templates (C:\Users\Ron\Documents\IT\Templates), we have:

(I moved them in there some years ago, so that the files I backup each night are all in the same place, and can be picked up by one simple Robocopy script.)

I had no problem until yesterday. I just feel that I must have changed something, but I have not yet figured out what it is

Ron.

Answer 5

The templates folder that appears in the Documents folder in Windows 10 is the "Custom Office Templates" folder, where Word defaults to storing any templates that you create. This is not the same as the actual Templates folder (%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates) where Office puts the Microsoft-created templates, including Normal.dotm. Check your access permission on the latter folder.

When Windows 10 first released last year, there was a bug where the OneDrive executable changed the permissions on the whole user profile, which prevented saving documents anywhere within that folder and its subfolders. That bug was fixed by an update long ago. Although I can believe that something similar has caused your problem, I can't reproduce it -- probably because I'm running an Insider version of Windows 10.