One of the best, most efficient things we have done in our office was done by a Office Power user several years ago. One day I was walking by Tina’s desk and saw her use some customized menus in her Word document program. ‘What’s that?” I asked as she was able to quickly and easily open up those documents that she used on a regular basis.
What she had done was to customize the normal.dot in Word to have a customized pull down menu. She then built macros to open up the file on her local ‘My documents”. Well obviously copying the “My docs” to each workstation wasn’t scalable so she re-wrote the macros and menu system to look at a mapped harddrive on the server. I then used this normal.dot template and copied it to each workstation in the office. She also built documents that have an upper ‘form’ section that they copies what you enter to the bottom section. We use these for reminder sheets for certain documents and the ability to enter the information once and then copy it to the bottom section, means we’re more efficient.
The result? Each workstation can quickly and easily get to standardized Word documents that we use on a daily basis. These standard tool bars make it much easier for all. Check it out! Customize your own normal.dot!
Not always a good idea to store "standard" customizations in normal.dot
Put them in a separate template (call it after your company or something) and distribute that to users’ Startup folders (c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Startup on a default install of Office 97 or up).
This works better because it lets you update the customizations centrally.