Hi Eric,

The "first few words" suggestion is actually Word's second choice, used only
if the Title field of the File Properties dialog is empty. In your case, I
suspect that the Title field of your Normal.dot contains the character "1",
this is being propagated into each new document, and it's being used to
suggest the file name.

To fix this, open Normal.dot itself -- use File Open, set the file type
dropdown to "Word Template", navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\your
login name\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates, and select Normal.dot. Go
to File Properties and clear the Title box. Save and close the template.

As for how the "1" got there, this is probably a variation of the problem
described at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/...ocNotBlank.htm --
although we still don't really know why that happens.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

Eric G wrote:
MS Word 2003 SP1 & XPP SP2



Hello,

When saving a new document in Word, Word used to suggest the first
couple of words in the document as a file name. Now Word has started
to suggest "1.doc" as my new file name, irrespective of what the
documents first couple of words are.

On removing (actually temporarily renaming) the "normal.dot" and
restarting Word, a new "normal.dot" is created and Word once again
uses the first couple of words as the name of the new file to be
saved.

My problem is that I have so many setting, macros and other
information stored in my old "normal.dot", that I would like to keep
this old version (that was newly created when I started with the 2003
version of Word). But this with suggesting "1.dot" for every new file
name is rather annoying.

My questions:

What have I done to Word, that makes it change its behavior?

How, and where, can I reset or change this annoying behavior?

Grateful for any suggestions.

Regards,

Eric G
Stockholm, Sweden