When I worked in word processing at Group Health, we had common templates on
the Server but were NEW templates - did not edit NORMAL.DOT at all. And
these templates were available to people in the supported departments only
with a login ID and Password. The original template was protected. The end
user could not edit those. Only open a new document based on that template
design. If membory serves me correctly, while you have Word OPEN, there is
a temporary file there with the little "~" as a file prefix . Don't know if
it's saved when Word is closed out. It is supposed to be temporary (a
backup?) - OUCH - Office 97?????? Holy cow! I haven't seen that in eons!
G

Is there any reason why the company hasn't upgraded to at least Office 2002?
It's so much better!
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Ever since I put my company's common templates on our server as workgroup
templates, we have had no end of problems with the app. Some of these a
messages about changes affecting the normal template - do we want to save?,
phantom (~$) versions of templates and docs remaining in the templates
folder after the relevant doc(s) or application is closed. A new Normal.dot
template appering on the server when Word is opened on a client pc even
though a Normal.dot template exists locally. Problems saving docs and
opening new docs based on the workgroup templates. Are there some rules or
best pratices re workgroup templates that I might not be following? Office
97 BTW, various clients, SBS2000 server.

TIA