To all

I think I have a bulletproof fix for what I have experienced and seen
discussed in this forum as the "default font" problem. From what I
have read and experienced myself, this problem seems to manifest itself
by the document insisting on displaying Times New Roman in the
paragraphs, tables, headers, etc of the Word document instead of the
default font that you expect to appear.

I would first like to make sure that I am not experiencing this
"default font" problem due to setting it wrong, or having unreasonable
expectations of Word even after setting the default font correctly.

Please read my procedures and tell me if I am setting the default font
correctly. Then, maybe we can discuss how we expect Word to behave
after setting the default font.

The goal: Set the default font (to something other than Times New
Roman) for all future documents that are based on a template
(Normal.dot or a custom template)

There are (at least) three ways to do it:

1) Create a new Word (.doc) file from Normal.dot (or whatever template
you base your documents on). On the menu bar, click on Format=Font.
Set the attributes (font, style, size, etc) for the default font. Click
on the "default" command button. When you close down the last Word
process (including Outlook if Word is your Outlook editor), Word will
update the template the document is based on. If that is Normal.dot,
Word will ask you before updating if you have the "Prompt to Save
Normal Template" feature turned on under "Tools=Options"

2) Edit the template (.dot) file and follow the steps in option 1. When
you create a .doc from this template, the default font should be what
you set up

3) Edit the template (.dot) file and modify the font for the "Normal"
style. When you create a .doc from this template, the default font
should be what you set up


By the way, the problem I'm having is that the font for tables based on
a custom table style seem to shift and change. I created a custom
table style in my template based on "Table Normal" which I presume
includes the font associated with the Normal style (in my case, I
picked Arial for my default font). I also made my custom table style
the default table style for all .doc files created from the template.
But, when I create a new .doc file based on my template and create a
table, the font in the table insists on coming up Times New Roman.
Since I modified the normal style in my .dot file (i.e., method 3
above) to have a font of Arial, I would expect the table styled with my
custom table style to have a font of Arial. Even when I edit my
template and set the font for my custom table style to be Arial
explicitly, then go create a brand new .doc file based on my template,
it still comes out Times New Roman