Workgroup Templates

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We have a shared workgroup templates folder on the server. In Word 2000 you get tab for each folder under the root shared folder. However, going 1 level lower, word shows all the files even though they are in different folders. The folder structure is similar to
Templates
Projects
123
456
789
All the files in folders 123, 456, and 789 show up under the project tabs without any reference to which folder they came from.
Any way around this? Without moving 123 etc. up to the template dir.

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There is not any way around this. Word’s template structure is limited to two level, the Templates directory, and the Folders in it. Any templates in those folders will show up when you click on the tab.
See the diagram in http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/templates.htm%5B/url%5D.

If you have more folders than will fit on two rows of tabs, the last tab in the back is “More” and clicking on that will give you all of the Folders in the templates folder.

When I’m talking about the templates folder, here, I mean the User Templates, the Workgroup Templates Folder, and the virtual folder that Word 2000 uses to hold its virtual templates.

Sorry that I don’t have better news for you.

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That was what I was afraid of. We seem to have too many folders. I guess we will have to use folders and unique names.

thanks

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Not completely germane to the problem at hand, but hopefully of interest:

You aren’t wed to using the baffling virtual folder that Word 2000 provides.

Instead you can create your own template directory structure set up as you choose (for example it could be identical to the one you used under Word 97). Then just make sure that your users all are pointed to the correct template locations under Options/File Locations.

This approach makes particular sense if you are working in a customized environment where you are providing your own templates, rather than the default ones Word provides (and you don’t want your users to see the default ones).

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If I’m understanding clearly what you’re after, your setup is similar to ours. To get the individual 123, 456, 789 tabs to show, they must be on the same level and not subfolded within each other, you then all you would need to do is set your workgroup template path so that it reads: templatesprojects. This will allow you to see the tabs 123 | 456 | 789 when you go into File | New. However, as you were thinking, perhaps giving those tabs more descriptive names instead of numbers would help out greatly and if doing that, you might could eliminate Projects as a folder and just have all your folders directly under Template. Nothing more fun than strategizing delivery to the masses, huh?

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You lost me there. You are right this is much easier with visuals. Let me try to clarify. The tree looks something like this
+Templates
–+Projects
| –123
| –456
| –789
+Standards
+Marketing

There are a lot of folders. That is why we where trying to move some of them under a group heading like project. Hoping that under the project tab we would see folders that we could drill into.
Doesn’t work that way it seems

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Ahhh, I see what you’ve got now. Well, my next thought would be, since you’ve grouped them in major categories as you have, are access to them departmental by chance – meaning that every user doesn’t need access to every folder? If you were that lucky, you could stay structured just as they are and get by ok by pathing them to the appropriate folder, but I rather suspicion you have people that need access to say Projects, Standards and Marketing simultaneosly which creates the rub. And you’re right, it doesn’t seem to work.

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If you really have that many templates then there is a nightmare task for you to maintain them all. Have you thought about combining groups of them into single templates where the different contents are chosen by inserting an autotext from a dialog that appears as a new file is created.

An example of this is a single template which contains only the boilerplate text that is common to all but has 25 different sets content held as autotext entries. We use such templates for things like MIL-STD-498 software documentation where the headings and contents are prescribed by a standard and the user can choose which document type they want from the one template.

The benefits are that styles, company names, addresses etc can be changed in one place rather than 25 thus reducing maintenance time considerably.

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Hi,

We’ve done something quite different on our site.

Instead of relying on the File, New template directories, we have a user dialog for new documents. The user presses a button on the taskbar to initiate this; the dialog box has a number of different buttons for different classifications of documents; within each classification, there is a tab index on the top.

A user can create their own favourites folder, so that 95% of the time, once they’re set up, they need no further navigation.

Customising the interface this way obviously has a big cost in setting up- but it has big advanatages to the user, and it helps us to control quite easily what the user sees, and how it is organised.

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One other thing you can do. I’ve never liked the File/New to select templates (although it may be necessary when you have numerous templates). Instead I put a new menu on the menu bar. Then I use a macro to bring up a new document based on that template & put that macro on the menu bar. Since you can use shortcut keys to access the new menu, you save a couple of steps.

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What we have done is to set up a Word document that contains hyperlinks to templates. The document acts like an index.htm web page. The opening page can have links that are linked to bookmarks within the document. The opening page links would be names of categories of templates. When you click on a category, it goes to a list of links listed under the category name. Clicking on one of these links would open a template.

The nice thing about this approach is that you can use a descriptive name for the links and can even add an explanation under the link to describe what the template is used for.

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Excellent feedback. I like, I like and benefit from it myself.

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That’s an excellent technique. Do you think you could take a screen shot & attach it?

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Or even attach a sample of the index page?

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Do your hyperlinks open a new file based on the template or the template itself? Did you need code to get the new file option?

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Using hyperlinks in a Word document, I find that clicking the link opens the referenced document, which isn’t going to work for most people. Fortunately for us, a lot of our workgroup “templates” actually are just documents, so if I make those Read Only at the OS level, then when I click I get a copy of the document. That’s reasonable, except for the annoying message when you Save.

How do you get this to work with true templates?

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Sorry I haven’t responded sooner, I have been fighting the flu.

Later today I will try to attached a dummy “index.htm” page for you all to evaluate and try to answer your questions.

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I have attached a dummy index page.

To answer your questions:

The hyperlinks open the template, not a new doc. Therefore, as jscher 2000 says, you have to make the template read-only, which is really no big deal. There is probably a way to code to open a new doc, I am not experienced enough to write it. There also may be a switch that could be added to the end of the hyperlink to make a new doc open.

As stated in a previous post, the best features about this method of distributing access to templates is that you can be very descriptive of what the templates are for and you can organize them so it is relatively easy to find the templates you need.

I haven’t attached a document to this forum before, so I hope it works. Any questions, just ask.

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A step past this would be to have macros that create a new document based on the template. It should be possible to set up a table with the template full name in one column and a macrobutton in the adjoining column that calls the macro to do this.

If I get it done, I’ll post it. My letterhead system could sure use something like that.
http://www.addbalance.com/word/download/in…etterheadSystem

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Hi, we’ve got around the fact that the document/template itself is opened by actually having the link open a document that contains a Document_Open procedure to create a new document based on a specific template and to close the original document, eg

Private Sub Document_Open()
Dim strCurrentFilename As String
CurrentFilename = ActiveDocument
Documents.Add Template:=”C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeTemplatesProjectsNewProject.dot”, _
NewTemplate:=False
Documents(CurrentFilename).Close

End Sub

The NewProject.dot template contains a Document_New procedure to get info from the user to populate the new document being generated.

Thus the link Opens an Originating File that starts a new document based on a specific template and closes the Originating File.

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That sounds like what I want, Karen, to base a new document on the template and close the template, but it gave me a blank new document. In file|new, when you base a document on a template, you get the text that was in the template. Can you or someone tell me what’s missing that would give me everything that I’d get via file | new? This is an urgent need at the moment, and I was very excited to see this solution. I hope someone can help make it work.

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Hi Wendy,
You should be getting the same result you get with File|New. I’ll try to explain it better.

First, you are dealing with an html link on a web page. This links to a standard Word document (the Originating File in my last post) that contains a Document_Open procedure.

When you click the html link the Originating File is opened and the Document_Open procedure kicks in. This creates a new document based on a specified template (The NewProject.dot in my previous post.)

Second, once the new document that is based on NewProject.dot is created, the Originating File is then closed. You should be then left in a window containing the new document.

We’ve used this system on a netscape intranet, haven’t tried it any other way yet.

Hope this is clearer.

Note that you are not closing the template. Make sure you are closing the Originating File and not the new document based on the template.

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Karen, I’m very excited that you’ve used this on an intranet. In my second post I quoted the error message I got (here it is again: “Add method or property is not available because this document is in another application”). I have it working now in Word (though not from Document_Open – I copied it from there to AutoOpen and then it executed when I linked to it from a Word document), but in our browser, I can sort of understand that it’s trying to open the document in the browser instead of in Word and that must be what it means by “another application”. We use Microsoft Internet Explorer; it sounds as if Netscape handles this ok but MSIE does not. Do you or anyone know how to get MSIE to not integrate with Word and to open the document directly in Word? Or is there some other answer?

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Interestingly enough, I tried this in Word 97 only – no intranet or anything – just created a Word file with a hyperlink to my originating document, which then fired up the NewProject.dot. All worked fine until the bitter end when the form in NewProject was being unloaded and Word crashed. I don’t know whether this was coincidence, because yesterday I had struggled to install a scanner on my pc and gave up due to incompatibility issues – this may have made my system unstable.

The problem with the Add method not being available may be corrected by you prefixing it with an Application object – after setting the Application object to be Word. I’ve never had to do this but I’m sure someone out there could help.

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Thanks, Karen. I’ll look into the Application Object. Word also crashed on me yesterday when I was running the macro. I hope it’s just because I was trying too hard and don’t have things exactly right.

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Ask and ye shall receive – from the Microsoft KnowledgeBase:

WD2000: AutoOpen Macro Fails to Run Opening Document in Browser

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Thank you jscher. I’m getting there. I found (with some difficulty) the corresponding article for Word 97, which is http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/ar…s/Q244/2/66.ASP. The setting mentioned in the Word 2000 solution doesn’t exist on my NT/Word97 system. In the Word 97 solution, they said to create a shortcut and link to that, typing in the name. That didn’t work with the ‘Shortcut to abc.dot’ name. I tried to rename the shortcut to something that would be understandable and was short enough to be an acceptable DOS name, but so far, I’ve only got it to work with the real DOS name (SHORTC~4.LNK). But it did work!

What a hassle for maintenance, though. I have copied the shortcut to my C drive, in DOS renamed the shortcut, then copied it back to where I want it on the LAN and that also worked. So really it’s only a hassle for me. No problem.

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I should correct what I said about the shortcut – it’s bad but not that bad. I had to rename the shortcut from ‘Shortcut to abc.dot’ to ‘abc.LNK’. Then I had to use the dos name for that, which you find on the first tab of properties in Explorer. Since the shortcut name was shortened, the dos name for the shortcut begins with the same letters, which is a lot better than having a whole bunch of files with names like ‘shortc~1’.

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I found part of my problem, and it sort of works. The variable name was defined with as strCurrentDocument, but the ‘str’ prefix was missing when it was used. I had to put this code into a macro called AutoOpen. But from an intranet page, I get an error that says: Add method or property is not available because this document is in another application. Does someone know what’s required to make this work from a web page?

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