Help with Templates - Word97-SR1 1

[JPeters]

Fellow Guru's;

Okay... Many of you know I've been working on a few forms recently. Well I think that they're done! Now I have them saved as .doc files. I would actually prefer that they were saved as templates so that the user can never overwrite them and such.
When I saved it as a template, I noticed something about myself. I don't know the first thing about templates. I saved it as a template and then closed it. Opened it up, and I edited it, tried to save it - and lo and behold. It let me save it.
What am I doing wrong? I will be e-mailing these forms (whether template or doc) to several people. If I do e-mail it to them, what steps do I need to take to ensure that the user will never overwrite the template and to make sure that they save their products as documents when they are through editing the template.
Once again I'm lost, I appreciate any help. Thanks in advance!
-Happen609
Wasting more of your valuable time...

 

[dianemarie]

Hi Happen, when you save a Word document as a Word template to be used by many people in the company, typically the template is stored in a Workgroup templates folder (our network guy set up a shared template folder on the network, and we point the users to this file in Word from Tools-Options-File Locations). A user will access the template by going to File - New, and then click on the template that they want. (Our workgroup templates show up on a tab in the Open dialog box called General but I'm not sure about the technical specifics of how that happens. I think Word does it automagically once you are pointing to the folder.) In any case, when the user opens a template from File-New, they are actually opening a document copy based on the original template. The template is never opened by the user. However, if a you (or a user for that matter) were to choose Open File, and browse to the folder location where the template is actually stored, and Open it, you will open the template itself, and you can make changes or modifications and save the file. If you think that there would be an issue with a user finding and opening the actual template, then you may want to consider password protecting it. I have never had a problem with this myself. You know when you are in a copy of the template because the extension will be a .doc. When you actually open the template itself, you're extension will be .dot.

 

[JPeters]

Diane,
Thank you for the overview. Okay, so I've got to place it in their templates folder for it to work properly. That is great to know. -Happen609
Wasting more of your valuable time...

 

[dianemarie]

Yup, you boiled my verbosity right down to the nitty gritty. Thanks Happen.