But if she is changing the styles in Normal.dot directly and expressly
saving Normal.dot, as she says, then the problem must be down to something
else. Fiona, if you're on a corporate network, make sure that Normal.dot
isn't being overwritten at startup. If this is the case, do what you should
probably have done in the first place and create a specific document
template with the styles and formatting set as you prefer, and then select
that from the File New dialog when you want to create a document.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Charles Kenyon" wrote in
message ...
It appears that you are missing the step: Save to template... after you
have
modified your styles.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
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from my ignorance and your wisdom.

"fiona nelson" wrote in message
...
Using word 2000 with updates (help about now reads as word 2002? - from
my
IT
guys)

I changed computers at work. I then went to change all my styles in Word
to
reflect my own preferences, closed word, and repopened to find nothing
"stuck". From other threads I read this was becasue normal.dot was not
saving properly so I re-did my styles (know them off by heart now :-))
and
used shift+file/ save all. Again I closed out of word and found that
upon
re-opening none of my changes had stuck again. I also noted that I
would
expect to get the message "Do you want to save normal.dot?" and this
didn't
appear, and the normal message "word is saving normal.dot" did not
appear
in
the task manager pane at the bottom of word.

I eventually figured out how to open Normal.dot directly and make the
changes there, but I was wondering if anyone knows why word is
exhibiting
this behaviour? I did not have "Prompt to save normal template" ticked,
but
I thought that shift+file /save all would over ride that anyway?

Any help would be appreciated as I don't want to have to open Normal.dot
every time I decide to change something.

Thanks,

Fiona Nelson