Word Normal.dot template corruption

When automating MS Word, one of the problems that can be encountered is corruption of the normal.dot template. When this happens, the template can be deleted, because it will automatically be recreated with default settings. It would have been nice after all these years, and thousands of features that have been added into Word, if they had a built in feature to do this.

The manually process is not entirely straight-forward, because the normal.dot template can exist in many places.


Here are the basic steps to delete it.

1. Close all word documents. Run task manager, and check applications and processes to make sure there are no instances of winword.exe running. 
2. Close Outlook too.
3. Click on the Start option, click Search, then Files or Folders.
4. In the Name box, type the name of the global template for your version of Word. For Office 2007/2010 this will be normal.dotx or normal.dotm. For older versions of Office, this will be Normal.dot
5. In the Look In box, select your local hard drive
6. Click Search to locate the file.
7. For each occurrence of global template that appears in the Find dialog box, click the right mouse button on the file and then click Rename. Add a new file name, such as OldNormal.dot or Normal-1.dot.
8. Retest the application that is creating the Word document.