ab-normal.dot – Why are all my documents locked?

I have been dealing a lot with documents. I have a fun project dealing with WPF documents that I hope to blog more on soon. Anyway, the last few days I have noticed that every document I open is locked. In order to do anything, even cut-and-paste, I need to go to Tools –> Unprotect Document. Then I am good to go.

After about 4 days of just ignoring it I decided I needed to figure out what was wrong. None of the documents were intended to be protected, I could even create a new sample document, save it, then re-open it and find it now locked. That last test is what brought me to the realization: normal.dot was not so normal anymore.

normal.dot is the base template file that Word uses for all of its documents. If it gets corrupted or otherwise gets something stuck in it’s teensy little binary brain, it will affect every document you create or even just open to read. So, if you have this issue, or something else weird that is happening to all of your Word documents, try this:

Find the normal.dot template file location

Thankfully Word helps with this: go to the Tools –> Options. Select the File Locations tab. Select the User Templates item in the list. Click Modify and a file browser will open to your templates directory.

Rename the file

You can, I am sure, just delete the old normal.dot file, but I always feel safer renaming it something like this:

Open Word

This prompts Word to create a new normal.dot with all the default settings since it can’t find the old one.

Hope your problem went away.

If your particular flavor of weirdness goes away at this point then the template was your problem. If not … well not so much. Keep looking.

Hope this helps