[Ian]

Will be migrating a site from Offce 97 to Office XP (or 2003) and need to
find a way to disable the the right-hand 'New Document Sidebar' which pops-up
every time you execute File-New...

I know of the "show at startup option" but this _doesn't_ do the job
properly - this sidebar will still keep reappearing under certain
circumstances.

The users on this site are speed-typists. They need to be able to create new
documents based on a selection of preset templates. They need to be able to
do this quickly and efficiently. In Word 97 this was easy to program using a
custom New.. button on the toobar, and Workgroup Templates. This brought-up a
folder-based view of the available templates. Which is what I want to achieve
here.

The Office XP 'sidebar' however prevents this method of working, since any
attempt to create a new document causes this (screed of useless technobabble)
to appear instead of the template view.

Any ideas? I asked this (and did a fair amount of testing trying to solve
it) in the days of Word 2000, but no-one had an answer. Just hoping Word 2003
might be better!