Also, although the styles may have the same names, they don't necessarily
have the same formatting. But the main purpose of Normal.dot in this case is
to store your customizations of *your* copy of Word: any AutoText entries
you may add or customizations you may make to toolbars or menus, the default
view or Zoom, the way the program looks when you open it.

--
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.

"Jay Freedman" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 6 Mar 2006 19:21:28 -0800, getravel
wrote:

Can someone please explain the difference between Normal.dot and online
templates - each with the exact same styles. Or point me to a Web site
that
can explain the difference. Please see my concern below.

I work in an office where we have Normal.dot set up with the styles we
use
in our engineering documents. We also have online Word templates set up
with
the same styles so the engineers can enter their information and the
formatting would be applied.

If the online templates contain the styles needed to format the
engineering
documents, why do we need Normal.dot to have the same styles. Why do we
need
Normal.dot at all???

Any explanation you can offer would ge greatly appreciated.

What you're calling "online templates" supply the formatting for
specific types of documents. (They don't have to be online; they could
be stored locally on each computer.)

Normal.dot supplies the formatting for the "blank document" that Word
creates by default if you don't choose another template. It also loads
like an add-in for all other documents. Word can't operate without
Normal.dot; if you delete the file, Word will automatically create a
new one.

For more explanation of this, see
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Custom...latesStore.htm,
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/temp...ons/index.html, and
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/P...cle.asp?ID=151.

The main reason to keep the styles the same in both types of templates
is to prevent problems that occur when you copy/paste material from
one document to another, in which styles have the same name but
different definitions. See
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/shar...matChange.html for a
description of this problem.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.