Today I'm going to show you how to set up a default template for new documents in Microsoft Word. Today's question comes from Ellen in Gulf Shores, Alabama, one of my Platinum members. Ellen says, "Microsoft just updated Office, and they set the default font to this new Aptos, which I don't like. How can I get back to Calibri without having to change it for every new document I create? This is annoying. Help!"

Yeah, this happens from time to time. What you can do, Ellen, is you can set up a default template so that every time you open up Microsoft Word, it has your settings that you like. You can set your font, your margins, all that different stuff. Let me show you how to do it.

Alright, the first thing we're going to do is start up Microsoft Word, go to a blank document, and here you can see, yep, there's your Aptos. And that just came out, I think, a couple of months ago. It's currently March of 2024, so I think sometime around the new year this came out. And yeah, it's not bad, you know, this is Aptos. A lot of people like it. Microsoft makes changes from time to time, but if you don't like it, you want to go back to the original Calibri, or even go earlier than that. I'm a Times New Roman fan myself. Yeah, I know it's old school, but I still like it.

So let's say you want to set this back to Times New Roman. You want to go back a few decades. So let's put Times New Roman in here. I just think it looks elegant. This is Times New Roman. I like it. OK? You could change the font size. You don't have to leave text in here, but you can if you want to. Change the font size. Let's say you like your margins different. Let's go to layout, and let's say instead of the one-inch margins, you like moderate. One inch top and bottom and three-quarters on the left and right.

So make whatever other changes you want in here. It'll save most of them, not all of them, but most of them. Now we're going to save our document. You can go to File, Save, Save As. You can go Control S to save. That's what I like to do. Down here we're going to click on More Options. We're going to change the document type to Word Macro-Enabled Template. Even if you don't have any macros in this file, we're still going to save it as a macro-enabled template, DOTM is the extension.

Now Word's going to try to save it in your Custom Office Templates or custom office templates folder. Users, Amacron, document, whatever. We don't want to save it there. We have to save it in a special location for this to work. So click on More Options again right there. That's going to open up this classic "Save As" dialog box. I prefer this thing, to be honest with you.

Now we have to find where Word's default templates are located. And there's a trick. You can type that in to go right to the templates folder. So just come right up here to the address bar and just put that right in there, whatever I gave you right there, %appdata% and then backslash Microsoft backslash Templates. Alright, press Enter, that will take you right there. Now on my system, it happens to be this, OK? %appdata%\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Templates.

Now you'll see in here, you might see in here, you might not see it, but you probably will, a normal.dotm. That's the file that we have to replace. But we can't save over that one. If you do it, it's going to give you an error. It's going to say you can't save it because it's in use. Why is it in use? Because it's open right now. That's the one we're working with. So we're going to change this. You can call it anything you want to. Call it normal2.dotm or whatever you want. That's going to save it in that folder. Alright. Hit save. OK. We just saved it.

Now, close Word, open up Explorer or whatever you use for file management, right, this is just Windows Explorer, and again, put that in there, that %AppData%\\Microsoft\\Templates. Press Enter, it'll take you back to that folder. Alright, in my case, it's Users, Amacron, %AppData%\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Templates. It'll be different for every system, OK? Now, here's the default one. Delete it, that normal.dotm. Don't worry if you want to go back to the original, you can just delete yours and Word will create a new one every time it loads. But now we're just going to rename this normal2 right there, just rename that to your normal.dotm. OK? Are you with me so far?

Alright. Let's minimize this or close it. Now go back and open up Microsoft Word again. And new document. And presto. There you go. You got Times New Roman, you got the three-quarter inch margins. See that? Eh? Eh? You like? You like? Come on, you gotta like. You gotta like.

So that's it. It's not exactly easy, but once you know where to put it, it's not that hard to do either. Now you know how to change your default template for Microsoft Word, and again, if you don't like this one, you want to go back to the default. All you have to do is delete that normal template file and Word will create a new one next time it starts up. Because, normally, I would have you back it up first before messing with it. But in this particular case, Word will just make a new one. So don't worry about that.

And you can actually have multiple template files so that you can just create shortcuts to them and open those up and then every time you create a new document, it will be based on the template that you open. There's lots you can do with it. I cover more about templates in my full Microsoft Word course. Check it out. It's on my website. But that's going to be your TechHelp video for today. I hope you learned something, my friends. Live long and prosper.

I'll see you next time. Oh, and one more thing. Tune in tomorrow and I'll show you how to do the same thing with Excel. And then after that, we'll talk about Access and PowerPoint. Although I don't usually use template files for Access and PowerPoint that are like default templates. But we'll get to it. We'll get to it. But tomorrow is Excel. So come on back tomorrow. Alright. Bye.

TOPICS

Creating a default template in Microsoft Word
Changing the default font in a Word template
Setting custom margins in a Word template
Saving a new template in Word
Using the Save As dialog box in Word
Navigating to the Microsoft Word templates folder
Locating and using the %appdata% directory
Replacing the normal.dotm file
Renaming a template file in Windows Explorer
Opening a new document with the default custom template settings
Deleting and restoring the default normal.dotm file
Creating shortcuts to multiple Word template files
Creating default templates for other Office applications (mentioned as an upcoming topic)