Thursday, June 21, 2012

setting your defaults for Word documents

One of the things that always drives me crazy is having to alter odd formatting settings every time I open up a new document. For example, the default for my Word program is a document that puts spaces after every return. Today I figured out how to change this. Buried in your file structure is a template document. If you open this in Word you can adjust everything to how you like it, save it, and from that point on every new file will start off with that new default formatting. These things might include:

  • margins
  • fonts
  • the way you view the document
  • line and paragraph spacing
  • others
You can look up "change the default settings for new documents" in the Word help, then choose the "change other default settings in the Normal template" and it will tell you how to find that file.

Alternately, you can probably search your hard drive for "Normal.dotm" to find the file