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I have been able to change the default font to what I want, and the default margins, but cannot find a way to change the default style. I want to have it default to "No Spacing" instead of "Normal".
Note: I edited this on 9/27/11 to put "Normal" instead of "Paragraph", which I had erroneously put in originally.
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That setting doesn't ring a bell. Where do you set it?
When all else fails to change a default, I suggest opening the template for edting, NORMAL.DOTM is the default, and make changes there.
I tried this and it seemed to work. It's different from the way I have done it in the past. Here is what I did to change from "Normal" to "No Spacing":
Open a Word document.
Click on File.
Click on Open.
Click on Templates.
Double-click on Normal.dotm.
Click on "No Spacing".
Click on File.
Click on Save.
Click on the "X" in the upper right corner to close the document.
Then the next time I opened a Word document, it showed "No Spacing".
This is the only setting I have tried to change, but hopefully this method would work for other settings as well.
Indeed, opening the Normal template from within the Open dialog box also works (the trick with the Visual Basic Editor helps if you are having troubles finding the Normal template).
Note that while applying a different style (No Spacing in this case) to the blank paragraph in Normal does work, it will be more reliable to change the document defaults.
Yes, that is a different approach to editing the NORMAL.DOTM directly, but it accomplishes the same thing. Any setting changes you apply this way will be saved. Well, ones that are actually saved in NORMAL.DOTM.
Settings are saved in several other places: the registry, *.ACL (spelling), Building Blocks.DOTM (for autotext type entries), *.THMX (theme formatting) etc. It is hard to find documentation specifying where everything is saved. Especially since it is changing from one version to the next.
To quickly open the Normal template as a document, you can use the following trick: In Word, press Alt+F11 to display the Visual Basic Editor. Press Ctrl+G to activate the Immediate window. Type
NormalTemplate.OpenAsDocument
and press Enter. Normal opens in a separate document window (look at the title bar). Close the Visual Basic Editor and change the defaults in Normal.
Note that most changes (such as changing font, size, line spacing, etc.) can be done from Word's dialog boxes, without opening Normal. If you find that you have to open the template for these changes, something is preventing you from correctly saving it. This must be troubleshot separately; see the sections referring to add-ins in the KB article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541/en-us/.
I tried this and it seemed to work. It's different from the way I have done it in the past. Here is what I did to change from "Normal" to "No Spacing":
Open a Word document.
Click on File.
Click on Open.
Click on Templates.
Double-click on Normal.dotm.
Click on "No Spacing".
Click on File.
Click on Save.
Click on the "X" in the upper right corner to close the document.
Then the next time I opened a Word document, it showed "No Spacing".
This is the only setting I have tried to change, but hopefully this method would work for other settings as well.
To quickly open the Normal template as a document, you can use the following trick: In Word, press Alt+F11 to display the Visual Basic Editor. Press Ctrl+G to activate the Immediate window. Type
NormalTemplate.OpenAsDocument
and press Enter. Normal opens in a separate document window (look at the title bar). Close the Visual Basic Editor and change the defaults in Normal.
Note that most changes (such as changing font, size, line spacing, etc.) can be done from Word's dialog boxes, without opening Normal. If you find that you have to open the template for these changes, something is preventing you from correctly saving it. This must be troubleshot separately; see the sections referring to add-ins in the KB article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541/en-us/.