I’ve recently moved over to Word 2003. Very pretty, look at the shiny GUI. I’ve also got Adobe 7.0 on my machine. Another pretty program. And of course, the Adobe 7.0 toolbar in Word, so that I can turn .doc into .pdf.

It’s been a while since I was a serious Word user, but I’ve had to get back into it lately. And I thought I was going crazy, or my machine was possessed. But I’ve recently reformatted my machine, so obviously that wasn’t the problem ;) But I kept redoing things that I swear I had already fixed. For example, I like 1″ margins, not 1.25″. So, when creating a new document, I go into Page Setup, and change the margins. Then I click the Default button to make sure that sticks. Same for the font - I don’t like Times New Roman. Change it, make it stick with the default button. I’ve also discovered that I can enter symbols into Word by making Autocorrect entries for them, so if I want the subset symbol, I type \subset and can have the symbol automatically inserted, instead of me having to look for it in the symbols menu all the time.

Now, I noticed that every time I opened my document again, I would have to reset the autocorrect options. How bizarre? Why wouldn’t they be the same? Aren’t those things saved, if not in the current document, then in the normal.dot template? Then I noticed on a fresh document that the margins were off, as was the font. Okay, obviously I’m going crazy. So I did a bit of testing. Yup, it turns out that even if I make changes, and save them as default, which I KNOW is supposed to save them to the normal.dot template, they weren’t sticking. And yet, I was getting no errors that said I couldn’t save to the normal.dot template.

I did a bit of searching, and thankfully, Villanova University User Support Services has already figured out my problem. In turns out that there is a conflict between Word 2003 and the Adobe 7.0 toolbar! Who knew? So there’s two options: save these kinds of changes manually to the normal.dot template, or disable the Adobe toolbar. I chose the first. It’s easy to do and the Support Services page lays it out quite nicely. Go about halfway down the page and look for “Changes Made to Normal Settings and Toolbars Won’t Stick”.