Looking at templates

[Gruff the Elder]

I was opening Word 2003 and got an error message about a corrupted template.
I clicked the "go ahead anyway" button. When I closed out of Word, I was
asked if I wanted to save changes to the template. I did.

The template in question was PalmApp.dot, which I didn't recognize. I
assume it has something to do with Palm's Desktop software that I have
installed. I wanted to look at it to see what was going on and discovered
that I have 4 similar files:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\Startup\~$ALMAPP.DOT
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\Startup\PALMAPP.DOT
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\STARTUP\~$ALMAPP.DOT
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\STARTUP\PALMAPP.DOT

The last one is the one that was "modified" today.

Nothing is immediately obvious when I open these files in Word 2003 (the
page is blank); should I be looking at available styles or something?

Can I safely delete at least the files starting with the ~? Also, these
files are in the \Startup directory, rather than the C:\Documents and
Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates directory. What's
the significance of that?

I also noticed that I have an old ~$Normal.dot file in the \Templates
directory. Can that be deleted?

And yes, I do have both Office XP and Office 2003 installed.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Taking things one at a time:

PalmApp.dot is indeed related to the Palm Desktop. It doesn't contain any text
or styles; it's just a container for macros that integrate Palm with Word.

Because the templates are in the STARTUP folder, they're loaded when Word
starts, and the macros are thus available in any document you open. Actually,
there are two STARTUP folders, and the one under Program Files is the "wrong"
one for most templates. The "right" one is at %appdata%\Microsoft\Word\Startup
(where %appdata% is an environment variable that points to a folder in your
profile). See
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/WhatTemplatesStore.htm, particularly
its footnote, for an explanation of why these are "right" and "wrong".

The files that start with ~$ are a variety of temporary file called an "owner
file", meant to prevent more than one person (usually in a network setting) from
using the same file at the same time. You can delete them, but it doesn't do any
harm to leave them.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all
may benefit.

 

[Gruff the Elder]

Thanks, Jay.

That was a very understandable explanation, and Dave Rado's article was also
helpful.

Given that I don't take advantage of the Palm/Word integration, I suppose
it's all academic anyway.