When I open a blank document in Word, why is it not blank?

September 11, 2007 8:44 AM

When I open a blank document in Word, why is it not blank?

Whenever I open a new blank document in Word, it is not blank. My wife's college paper she last wrote pops up every time instead. I'm using the osx version if that matters.

posted by metacort to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

It's possible your templates have been messed up somehow-- with Word closed, try searching for the file normal.dot and deleting all copies of it.
posted by phoenixy at 8:46 AM on September 11, 2007

When you go File > New, you should get a choice of "templates" to use. It sounds like you're choosing a template which she has somehow overwritten with her paper by accident? If you create a truly blank document then save over that template, you should be okay.
posted by wackybrit at 8:47 AM on September 11, 2007

Oh--as you're on a Mac, the file you're looking for may just be called "normal" instead of "normal.dot"
posted by phoenixy at 8:47 AM on September 11, 2007

Doc templates live in the MS Office folder. Do a spotlight search for the file and move it elsewhere. Open Word, see if it fixes things. A new Normal.dot will be created.

Note that all your preference for document settings (font, size, styles, margins, etc.) are stored in the Normal.dot template, so removing it will also reset all these to the MS default setting. You can get these back by importing the styles from an old document into Normal.dot and saving it, using the Style Organizer, but it's kind of a pain. Easier to just re-enter things manually unless you had a lot of custom styles.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:43 AM on September 11, 2007