Hi Jacqueline:

No, I don't think you have misunderstood. This is a vexed question, and
posed with the exact constraints you have, I struggle to find a clear choice
in advising you.

The benefit of using Normal for this purpose a
* It gives you only one file to maintain
* Word starts faster and performs better because it has only one file to
load and hold in memory
* VBA is massively simpler to write because Normal does not suffer from the
context-switching that other files do. Normal is *always* in scope.
* Toolbars and other customisations are *always* available to *all*
documents. Again, because Normal never goes out of scope.

The drawbacks include:
* You blow away the user's customisations every time you update.
* You can't have things "disappear" when the user doesn't need/can't
use/shouldn't use them.
* The user is also writing to your file, regularly and frequently. That
will lead to conflicts and corruptions.
* The brighter and more valuable the user, the more likely they are to be
offended by this behaviour. They will then either fight you, or leave.

The IT department is a "service and support" department. It is there to
"serve" and "support" the users. It should NOT be attempting to "control"
the users (OK, you have to make some exceptions for security, but this is
not one of them :-)) If the users start to "fight" you, IT department will
rapidly lose the battle -- there are more of them than there are IT staff --
collectively, they're smarter and quicker :-)

I suggest that with a very little effort, we could be a lot "nicer" about
this. For example, we could add one line of code to your distribution
script that checks the file last saved date on the user's copy. Replace
their file only if the new one is more recent.

You could put a run-once macro in your Normal.dot that pops up a dialog when
the user starts Word: "Your Normal template has been replaced. Your old
version has been re-named as "Normal.old". If you had customised settings,
please copy them from the old version to the new version. Click here to see
how to do this."

You could be even nicer, and make your run-once macro actually perform the
merge for them :-)

As to the discussion between "Normal" and "Blank Document", I wonder if
there is some confusion the not in your mind, but in the minds of your
instructors.

In Word 2002 and later, a "Blank Document" icon appeared on the toolbar.
This button does NOT necessarily create documents from Normal.dot. There
are specific circumstances under which Normal.dot may not exist in these
applications. If it doesn't, the blank document is produced directly from
Word's hard-coded defaults. That may be what they were referring to.

Hope this helps

On 15/3/06 1:27 AM, in article
, "Jacqueline"
wrote:

Previous firms I've worked with worked with two templates (blank and
normal) and during a VBA training course yesterday the trainer
recommended this. I then looked at previous posts on here and found
suggestions for both methods. Perhaps as you say I have misunderstood
these posts and the blank document template has contained 'add-ins' or
similar.


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John McGhie
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410