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OK, we are getting closer, just a matter of closing the communication gap between you and me. Not a problem. Option B had nothing to do with your problem, it is just for geeks and emergencies (you DOC is corrupted and you want to recover the body text only from it).

When you opened the NORMAL.DOTM in Word, as template, you saw exactly what you are supposed to see, a "blank" document. This is the base for every "new" document you see.

While you are in NORMAL.DOTM in edit mode, any change you make (and save when closing the document) will now appear in any NEW document you create.

So, if you modify a style, say "NORMAL" for discussion, and change the font to Times New Roman (like it used to be in 2003), then from now on all of your new documents would show the Normal style uses Times New Roman font.

Changes I typically make (hard to tell what defaults were since I already made them), File tab > Options option >:

Genreral Options: Change user name to my name,

Display: turn on Show All Formatting Marks (equivalent to clicking on the Show/Hide button on the Home tab), turn on Update fields before printing

Save: turn on Save Aurotrecover and reduce time interval to 5 minutes or less, turn on Keep last autosaved version if I close without saving

Language: make sure you have the "right" language selected ie Canadian vs Britsh vs US English

Advanced (ooh there are lots/too many in here to list all, many are specific to how you prefer to work, how much "automatic help" you want from Word ): turn off Show Picture Placeholders, Field Shading:Always, increase number of Recent Documents (I use 25, depends on your screen resolution), turn on show shortcut keys in tooltips, turn on show horizontal scroll bar, turn on vertical scroll bar, turn on show vertical ruler in print layout view, turn on Prompt before saving Normal Template (this one is important so you can keep track of changes made to NORMAL. if you don't know what changes it is asking to save, just say NO. Unfortunately MS still hasn't got around to telling us changes are being saved...) . turn on provide feedback with sound (I like to be beeped at...), turn on Confirm File format conversion on open (I want to always know before Word converts a file from one thing to another), File locations: I've changed the default file save location,

under Advanced > LAYOUT OPTIONS, there are lots of possibilities: my favorite is turn on "Do full justification the way WordPerfect 6.0 for Win does" (this is a more "intelligent" than default MS approach which only inserts full space char between words, WP approach inserts variable size spaces and also increases intra-letter spacing in words). Another one I like to turn on is "Don't expand character spaces on a line that ends with SHIFT RETURN. If you leave it off, on a fully justified line the words have huge spaces between them, if you turn it on the spacing remains normal. Another bunch to consider is the "Suppress extra line spacing at ..." group of options.

PS: Does anyone have a link to a full description of all of these options (for any version of Word, old version would be better than nothing). They are basically "me-too" features that MS added to allow former users of other tools to feel comfortable changing over to Word. So you have to be aware of the historical context and specific software feature that the option is emulating to make an informed decision if it is something you want.

Sorry, you have to use Word.

File tab > Open option > make sure "All Word Documents" or "All Word Templates" is selected > navigate to the correct location > open NORMAL.DOTM > make your changes.