Default View in Word 2016

Word no longer supports saving the view in a document or template. This was a design change in Word 2013. To force a certain view you will have to install auto macros as follows.

Sub AutoOpen()
ActiveWindow.View.Type = wdWebView   'Web Layout view
ActiveWindow.View.Zoom.Percentage = 100  '100% zoom
End Sub

Sub AutoNew()
ActiveWindow.View.Type = wdWebView   'Web Layout view
ActiveWindow.View.Zoom.Percentage = 100  '100% zoom
End Sub

Add these macros to the Normal template. See also http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm.

Note that the macro is useful even for older versions of Word, if you want to change the view for all documents: existing ones, new ones, those that you create yourself and those that you receive from other people.

Stefan's reply is specific to your question. A more general answer is a tool that another MVP has created to save the last used view with the document:

<snip>

I've just posted an add-in at http://jay-freedman.info to restore the old behavior. Download SaveView2013.zip to a convenient folder. Then

• Right-click the downloaded zip file, click Properties, and click the Unblock button in the Properties dialog if it's there.
• Extract the file SaveView2013.dotm from the zip, and store it in the folder %appdata%\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP.
• Start or restart Word.

A couple of notes:

(1)  If you open a document, change its view, and close it without making any other changes, the view won't be saved. You must make some change, such as inserting and deleting a space character. This is the same behavior as previous versions.

(2)  Unlike previous versions, this add-in doesn't change the view of new blank documents if you set the view in the Normal.dotm template. There's a technical reason (there is a NewDocument event, but it doesn't fire for the first blank document in a session, and I didn't want to confuse folks by only changing the view for 'some' new documents). I'll have to look at this some more.

</snip>