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BAM, these are workgroup templates. We don’t get to change people’s normal.dot. And the article begs the question – it talks about using an add-in. Well, I’m TRYING to.

I’m sure the AutoOpen will work. I’m resigned to really wanting one.

Gary, yes I am checking to see that the add-in is not already loaded. I can answer what happens if you don’t – it adds it again and the list of add-ins shows it twice, or however many times you add it. You don’t get an error, though.

Re: the single clicking, when I open the document based on the template, I go into Tools | Macro | Macros. All of them are listed and I select AutoNew. Before I click a button to say whether I want to Run or Edit it or what, my toolbar from the add-in shows up. When I checked under templates and add-ins before doing that, the add-in wasn’t there. After the toolbar showed up, I cancelled out of the Macros dialog and checked again – the add-in was there.

You’re right it stays loaded once it has been loaded.

Many thanks for the reply, Gary.
What I’m calling the global template contains subroutines to toggle a watermark and update some properties fields. There’s a toolbar with the watermark toggle button and with style buttons.

I was getting confused – the autonew specifically calls the update properties subroutine that’s in the global template, so that doesn’t execute by itself. That complication that I threw in can be ignored.

It sounds like you’re saying I misunderstood what an addin is – it doesn’t stay with the document the way a template and its macros stay with the document. It’s this that I really want confirmed before I do the AutoOpen. Here I went and created this global template so I’d have to only make changes in the one place, and now I have to go and update all the templates.

I CAN just copy the code in the AutoNew to an AutoOpen, minus the call to the properties subroutine. Or I guess, I’d have
Sub AutoNew()
DoTheAddIn
DoThePropertiesSubroutine
and
Sub AutoOpen()
DoTheAddIn
and have DoTheAddIn as a subroutine. Is that what one would do?

What triggers the AddIn to get added when I go to look at the macro without actually having to look at it? If code is required in an AutoOpen to ensure the global template is loaded, and I don’t have code there, what makes it get loaded when I select but don’t open the AutoNew? I don’t suppose I NEED the answer to this question. Besides, in my AutoNew, I look around a few places for the AddIn (in case the user is not connected to the LAN), and before giving up ask the user where it is, so I suppose I should want to execute my code rather than have Word do something automatically.

Responding to part of what you want, rather than what you asked, what about making the templates .dot files in their own directory and putting that directory on your desktop or the office toolbar? Then you could click on the icon and double click the template, and that will give you document1 and will not go to the template directory to do the save. That at least would protect your template and clicking the save button would bring up the save as dialog.

If you always, or most often, want to save to a particular directory, you can change the Documents location setting under Tool | Options | File Locations to the directory you want to see most often. When you save a document just created from a template, save as seems to come up with that location.

Chas, I’ve now downloaded your templates document. I don’t think I’ll be allowed to put a shortcut to the global template in each user’s Startup folder” and it certainly won’t be done for us on everyone’s PC. That’s why I was trying via the AutoNew macro to get the global template added into the documents.

When you say “A big part of the reason for templates is to have a central repository for code, toolbars, etc., rather than putting these into documents”, that’s what I’m trying to do. All my templates are based on a template that uses the code “‘AddIns.Add FileName:=strTMCPath, Install:=True'” to add in the template that’s the central repository, and I added the template to the References. I thought that would make the central repository template available to the documents based on the templates. Is that not true? In the documents, it seems I have to go into Macros and click on AutoNew to get the central repository template to activate. What am I missing?

Thanks, Legare. I’m not sure I understand what this says. There might be an alpha value in Sheet2!F1. It could have a value or be blank. Does this copy the cell only if it’s blank, or does it always copy it but if it’s blank turn it into a blank? We need it to do the latter.

But if the value in a cell is =Sheetname!F4, why would the value be different in the cell that references the other cell (one a space, one a blank)? If there’s something about the cell doing the reference that converts what comes in, what is it? Not cell format, since they appear to be the same.

I’ve read that doing a Save As instead of Save reduces the file size. And making sure you have the Fast Saves in Tool|Options|Save unticked.

There was a virus popular some time ago that exhibited the behaviour that save as was always to a template .dot file. You could check for that.

We have a similar problem in that Excel seems to think the worksheet is full. We wanted to insert a row, but got a message saying “cannot shift non-blank cells off the worksheet”. When we try to delete even one row (either the first supposed-to-be empty row or the last one), we get an hour glass for many minutes. We think the highest cell is K200. There are 5 sheets, all with links to this sheet.

The last person who worked in the spreadsheet does not know Excel very well and does not know what he’d have done to cause this problem. Would clicking the inside border button cause all the cells to be occupied? I suggested he do that when he wanted cell borders. I hope that didn’t cause this.

We tried copying the cells we wanted to a new sheet, but all the references screwed up.

I think I have the answer to checking if the addin is already there:
intAddInCount = AddIns.Count
For X = 1 To intAddInCount
If AddIns.Item(X) = “TemplatesMacroCode.dot” Then
booAddInFound = True
End If
Next X

Jefferson, now I see what you mean about it being a good idea to check if it’s already installed. But On Error won’t do it, because it’s not an error if it’s already installed. It just installs it again, so you have it however many times you’ve installed it. That’s what’s not such a good idea.

I haven’t figured out how to check if a particular addin is installed. Do I really have to read through all the addins to see if each one matches the one I’m looking for? I don’t even know how to do that. So much for pulling my code out of each template and putting it in a common template. I almost have as much code to just ADD IN the common template as I had IN the common template.

YES, yes, yes. Addin.Add worked on my machine and it worked on another machine that had never seen that addin before. And it worked when I already had the addin loaded and installed, Jefferson, so the coding to handle it when it’s already been loaded doesn’t seem to be required.

So that means I can move my common routines to a separate template and just put the Add code in the individual templates. Now to see whether all that’s required is to have the Add code in the template on which the other templates are based.

I actually tried that. In my AutoNew, I coded:
AddIns(“L:TemplatesProjectWatermark2.dot”).Installed = True

I also tried running it once the new document was open, in case it just can’t do it as an AutoNew. In both cases, on other computers, I got “Runtime error ‘5941’ The requested member of the collection does not exist”. I copied the template location from the code into the find command and it found the file, so the location is correct and everyone’s drive mapping is the same. It works OK on my own computer, but I think that’s because I manually attached that template once (and can untick it but the delete button is not available to remove it). I need to have it work for other people on the LAN though. Do I have to do something to attach it before I can say installed=true?

I also tried
AddIns(“L:TemplatesProjectWatermark2.dot”).Autoload = True
but that got a compile error: Can’t assign to a read only property.