Deploying normal.dot (2003)

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Hi all,

I’ve have spent many weeks configuring our Office 2003 rollout with the Custom Installation Wizard (CIW) – thankfully, our test installation appears to be working OK and we can open our existing Word97 documents and templates just fine. What I now need to do is change the default font in the normal.dot template to Arial, 12 point?

We are using CIW to create our default installation of Office 2003 and installing it on XP SP2; we are then disk imaging across our entire organisation. As we are disk imaging, we cannot run Office 2003 at all on the PC to be imaged and, therefore, Word 2003 hasn’t yet created its first normal.dot.

Is there anyway for me to change the default font in normal.dot before I image, or, worst case, after deployment?

TIA,

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I would not be famialiar with what you might be able to manipulate with the image you are sendion out, but after deployment……..
One thing I have used in conjunction with an Access database I administer and have to manage the normal.dot in Word for users from is I send out an email to users with a simple batch file attached that copies the normal.dot that I want them to have on their local PC’s from the server. Not very sophisticated, but for the about 50 users I only had a couple that had problems. This would mean all users have access to a common server location, and a common location for the normal.dot on the local PCs.

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Hi and thanks for your reply,

Your suggestion is what I would normally (forgive the pun) do for an Office/Word 97 installation, but in Office/Word 2003 the normal.dot is much more user specific and, I assume, more critical to the correct functioning of the newer features in Word 2003 (certificates, macro security etc).

I assume, again, that this is why Microsoft instruct you not, under any circumstances, to open any Office 2003 program on the PC to be imaged; as doing so adds specific user configuration info to the registry and other places (including the creation of normal.dot for the user). Consequently, I need to manipulate the normal.dot after image deployment and after a user has logged in (and their normal.dot created) – as you say, I could do this via scripting from the network…I’m just a bit nervous about the corruption that might be caused to Word 2003 configuration?

Can anyone else shed some light on this, may be some specific experience of Word 2003?

TIA,

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Ade,

With the caveat that I haven’t done any 2003-specific installations (other than on my home PC), I think you’re perhaps not making an accurate assumption, and therefore don’t need to be quite so nervous.

With regard to the Normal.dot in Word 2003 being much more user-specific, not sure what you mean there. Word 97 was the last version of Word which did not account for user profiles when determining default locations for things like the User Templates and Startup directories. Starting with Word 2000, the default User Templates location became user-specific – under each user’s individual Windows profile – so perhaps that’s what’s meant by the Normal.dot being more user-specific in Word 2003.

While Word has added new features with each new version, I don’t think there’s anything special about the function of Normal.dot in Word 2003 that makes the care and feeding of it much different from Word 2000 or Word 2002 – once Word 2003 has been installed for each user, you should be able to open up Normal.dot (whether directly or via script) and make whatever changes you need to it – or replace it outright per Carla’s advice – without tripping upon any Word 2003-specific issues.

Gary

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Hi Gary,

Thanks for that. You’re right…I was assuming that the location of normal.dot, within the Users Templates location, made it more user specific. Perhaps, as you say, it doesn’t. Having done some searching around the Lounge, I think I will be adding some VBA to our global template that will change the default font of the users normal.dot programmatically (see post 423877). NB: I have used the Office 2003 CIW to specify a standard, network, location for Workgroup and Startup templates in Word.

This way, I can be sure that the VBA will run whenever a user (exisiting or new) opens Word 2003, rather than having to wait for all my users to use Word, create their own normal.dot and then pull a new one from the network – also avoids having to add an error trap to the network script that would copy a network normal.dot over a users normal.dot (should it not exist).

Again, having looked around the Lounge (particularly in the VB/VBA forum) there seems to be lots of IT Managers looking for a solution to this problem – what strikes me as bizzare is that there is nothing on the Microsoft KB or Office site to tackle this issue?

Many thanks,

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Hi all,

We are having similar problems to the one outlined here about deploying word, but the suggested solutions don’t really fit our needs.

We are planning to roll out Office 2003 to hundreds of desks and would like users to start from scratch with a company standard Normal.DOT (fonts and margins being the main issue). Sending a separate file later, once everyone has logged in and started Word is just not practical – by then some people will have started making customizations and we don’t want to clobber anything. We just want to start with a fresh Normal on rollout.

If you can point us to some information, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks,
Margaret
– Melbourne, Australia.

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You might start with this thread from a few days ago: normal.dot revise & rollout (Word 2003). Does that help?

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I had read that thread, and have been to the list it mentioned (office admin templates), but I can find no mention of setting a default font for Normal.DOT. We are already setting lots of the options in that list.

But thanks – all pointers appreciated.

Margaret

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The default font is the one in the Normal style. While you have Normal.dot open for customization, you might want to redefine other styles as well, such as Heading styles, the tab settings for Header and Footer (if you change the default margins) and so on.

Added: I hadn’t read back to the start of this thread, where the original poster was using a tool that did not create a Normal.dot. I don’t know of a solution for that scenario. I’d create a Normal. dot.

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Margaret,

I’m just catching up on this thread as well as the one Jefferson has pointed to.

Andrew Lockton’s post in that thread (post 459344) is a suggestion worth considering – to expand on it just a bit, you should consider not using Normal.dot at all for the enforcement of things like fonts and margins – just leave Normal.dot alone so that users can keep things like autotexts or personal macros there.

To enforce firmwide settings for fonts, styles and margins, consider creating a set of templates for firmwide use for this purpose – in addition to having a firm-styled Letter, Fax etc. template, you can also have a FirmBlank template for general use – this is what would get used, instead of Normal.dot, to create general-purpose blank documents. This completely avoids the issue of distributing or replacing Normal.dots.

Gary

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