Publisher templates

[Neil Lomax]

Can anyone help? As a lecturer for the ECDL, CLAIT and C&G courses based on
Office 2000, I have discovered a problem that is really buggin me. In the
question papers, the students are often asked to save a document as a
Publisher template. "No problem" you might say, which it isn't if you are
saving to your profile i.e. the C: drive. Because these are actual live
tests, the students are required to save everything to floppy disk. This is
where the problem arises. Despite pointing Publisher to the floppy disk
(after the annoying habit of Publisher changing to the templates folder),
Publisher insists on saving the template to the templates folder on the C:
drive! The result is, when we come to mark the test papers, the disks do not
contain the templates.

Please help. Is there a bug in Publisher? This behavour does not occur with
any other Office programme.

 

[Frin]

I have just done a test on Publisher 2003 and no problems. This was
Save As>template (i agree it defaults to templates)> Floppy a and bobs you
uncle.

Is it possible the clever IT dept have made impossible for people to save to
the floppy drive. Just a thought.

 

[Mary Sauer]

This is a normal situation. Templates uses a different path than regular
publications. You can copy the template to the floppy, but it no longer will be a
template.

 

[Ed Bennett]

Because these are actual live tests, the students are required to
save everything to floppy disk.

This is *extremely* inadvisable.
I am not aware of the specific rules for these courses (having never taken
them), but a student today almost completely lost her entire business
studies coursework, as the disk upon which she was saving it corrupted.
It was completely inaccessibly in Windows ("The disk in drive A: is not
formatted"), and I had to use a recovery tool to retrieve the contents of
the disk.

I was able to retrieve the text, but had to reformat it in Word before it
was anywhere near ready to hand in for marking.

The risk of file corruption is extremely high when saving directly to floppy
disks, and as such it is not at all recommended, especially for exam
situations such as these.

Can you not create new profiles for exam purposes, have users save to those
profiles on the C: drive, and then copy to floppy disk at the end of the
exam?

USB Flash drives would be better than floppies, and they're relatively
inexpensive now (~£10 for 128MB last time I checked)