[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There are many settings that can be made globally, and there are many
changes that can be made to a template that will affect all new documents,
but there are no document-level settings that can be changed that will
affect existing documents.

For example, you can change settings such as AutoCorrect (on or off), and
these will affect all documents you open.

You can change the default font or modify Normal style or any other style in
the Normal template, and this will affect any new Blank Document you create.

You can modify styles in any other document template, and this will affect
all new documents based on that template.

By default, any changes you make in the UI (such as adding toolbar buttons
or menus), as well as such changes as creating macros or AutoText entries,
will be stored in the Normal template and will be available to *all*
documents. If you explicitly change the save location of such changes to a
different attached template, they will be available only to that template.
The number of such changes you can make in Word 2007 is more limited, but
changes to the QAT, macros, and Building Blocks/Quick Parts/AutoText can
still be saved either to Normal.dotm (by default) or to specific document
templates if they are explicitly selected as the save location.

Only changes in the UI (how Word looks and works) will affect all documents
or all documents based on a specific template. Changes in styles affect only
new documents *unless* you reattach the old template with "Automatically
update document styles* enabled (and even this won't update any
document/section-level formatting you have changed in the template, such as
margins, headers/footers, etc.).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"Nick" wrote in message
...
Suzanne S. Barnhill wrote:
I'm not clear exactly what you've done, but note that any changes you
make in any template (whether it's Normal.dotm or a specific document
template) will affect only new documents based on that template, not
existing ones.

Yes - that I think is where I've been confusing myself. Word settings are
document specific. They can't be set globally.

Thus when I open a document believing I have removed/deleted a pile of
other settings they "magically" reappear.

Is there a way to set themes globally and not by document?