Recently, I got a question from a reader who was distressed because when he went to create a new document in Word, the Blank Document wasn’t blank. Somehow, he’d managed to add text into his Blank Document, so he was forced to delete out a bunch of stuff before he could do anything in Word.
You may not realize it, but every document in Word is based on a template. In general, creating a new template is easy. You just create a document and then Choose File|Save As and change the Save as type to Document Template (*.dot ). The Blank Document you get by default when you create a new document in Word is actually based on a template called Normal.dot. If you accidentally get text in there, you need to open the Normal.dot template, remove the text, and resave the file. Word won’t let you save a regular document as the Normal.dot template (you get an unhelpful error message). So you have to open Normal.dot directly and resave it.
Probably the hardest thing is figuring out where the Normal.dot template is on your computer. Later versions of Word put it deep in a folder hierarchy based on your username, so it’s something like: C:Documents and settings Your NameApplication DataMicrosoftTemplates. You can find out where it is stored by choosing Tools|Options|File Locations and looking at User Templates. Alternatively, you can do a search in Windows Explorer for Normal.dot. Once you find the file, either right-click it in Windows Explorer and choose Open or from within Word, choose File|Open. Whatever you do, don’t double-click the filename. That just causes a new document to be created that’s based on the Normal template. Once you have found and opened the Normal.dot file, remove the text and save it.
Unfortunately, it is possible for things to go really wrong with a template, so it becomes corrupted. If so, it’s better to just start over. If Word can’t find the Normal.dot template when it opens, it has to regenerate a fresh one. Any custom settings in your old Normal.dot such as formatting, macros or AutoText will be lost and you’ll be back to the plain-vanilla version that comes with Word. If you love your custom settings, you can rename your old Normal.dot to Normal-old.dot and then let Word generate a new Normal template. Then you can choose Tools|Templates and Add-ins and click the Organizer button. In the Template Organizer, you can then pull in stuff you want from your old Normal.dot.