Documents won't stop opening in Publishing view

Question

I have a Mac, with Mojave, and am using MS Office 2011. Every time I open Word, the documents open in Publishing view. I have gone to the normal.dotm template and changed it to be in Print Layout view, resaved it to the same location (Users-->Library-->Application Support, etc), made sure that I could reopen it the template by double clicking it, and I've opened Word directly by clicking the "W" icon to make sure it opens to the Print Layout view, and then one or two times later I'll open Word again and it's reverted back to Publishing view. Argh!!!!!

I'm really getting frustrated with this.

Answer 1

When launched directly, Word 2011 presents in the same View that was in effect when the program last was quit. IOW, if a Pub document is displayed when you Quit Word a Pub document is generated when you next launch the program. All you should need to do is:

1. Launch Word
2. Switch to Page Layout View
3. Quit Word

From then on Word should present the new blank document in Page Layout View whenever you launch it directly. If not, perhaps the Normal.dotm has been damaged & may need to be replaced.

However, it sounds like your situation may go a bit beyond that. For example, if you have a Pub document displayed, Command+N will generate a new blank document but in Pub View & the typical File> New Blank Document is changed temporarily to File> New BlankPublishing Layout Document. It's difficult to pinpoint without more descriptive detail pertinent to what you mean by your last sentence.

Answer 2

Word doesn't consider a change to the view to be a change to the file. So if you open Normal.dotm, change the view and save, Word does nothing. Instead, after opening Normal.dotm and changing the View, type a character, save, delete the character and save again. Close it and test if the default view is now Print Layout.