Word templates not opening as new documents

Anonymous
2022-02-07T06:40:36+00:00

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-templates-not-opening-as-new-documents/36dd51b5-b434-4f2b-85be-3db9aebd45eb?page=6

The thread was closed after this last post. Registry edits were suggested. That sounds quite easy compared to dealing with the ongoing file save problem.

Would you please tell me how to manually correct the file associations in the registry?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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  1. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-02-12T08:41:22+00:00

    Did you run an On-Line repair of the Office installation? If not, try repairing the Office installation as detailed in the Knowledge Base article at:

    https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Repair-an-Office-application-7821d4b6-7c1d-4205-aa0e-a6b40c5bb88b?CorrelationId=1b0030f4-8cc5-4485-b495-810e2a7d1284&ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-02-11T22:52:53+00:00

    You are right, the icons do not look correct and they are NOT being recognised as being of the Type Microsoft Word Macro-Enabled Template.

    What do you see if you right click on the Ortho tests item, which does have a icon of the correct type.

    If you do open\edit a file such as the IR-Shoulder and then use File>SaveAs and select Word Macro-Enabled Templates (*.dotm) from the Save As type: dropdown (probably using a new filename) does the resulting file then have the correct icon?

    If not, try copying everything except for the final paragraph mark (¶) in the document and paste it into a new document that you then save as a Word Macro-Enabled Template and see if it has the correct icon.

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  3. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-02-11T05:24:42+00:00

    Look at the videos again. In neither of them did the document open with a file extension after the Document#!

    If you OPEN the dotm,

    Image

    it is the template itself that you are opening and as a result it shows the name of the template IR-Shoulder.dotm and if you make any changes and then click on Save, those changes will be made to the template itself, which would normally not be the desired result. If you use FIle>Save As, the file type will be Word Macro-Enabled Template (*.dotm) because that is the type of file. It will not be *.docm or *,docx, regardless if one of those types is set as the default under File>Options>Save.

    Image

    However, the default double click action for a template is that shown in bold font - New and if you click on New or double click, the document that appears on the screen with the Document# That document is created from the template and contains a reference to the template so that the code in the template is available for use with that document.

    Image

    WORD HAS WORKED THIS WAY FOR THE LAST 25 YEARS AT LEAST!

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  4. Stefan Blom 353.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-02-10T07:38:58+00:00

    >>Dropbox says, "This item might not exist or is no longer available."<<

    I don't think you mentioned Dropbox before, or maybe I just missed it.

    Anyway, the fact that you are using a third-party storage location may be part of the issue. Something may have changed recently in Dropbox, or something has changed in the way that Office programs interact with Dropbox.

    When I refer to double-clicking template icons, I usually mean doing so in File Explorer, for locally saved documents.

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  5. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-02-09T22:30:20+00:00

    I have uploaded two videos to the following folder of my OneDrive

    https://onedrive.live.com/?id=5AEDCB43615E886B%219881&cid=5AEDCB43615E886B

    One shows the result of double clicking on the template and the using File>Save As to save it when the "Save files in this format:" option is set to Word Document (*.docx)

    The other shows the result of changing that option to "Word Macro-Enabled Document (*.docm) and then creating a document from the template and using File>SaveAs to save it.

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