Oldfeller--FSO
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/3018001/consumer-electronics/how-to-fix-micros...How to fix Microsoft's latest update blunder: latest MS update nuked all the MS Office templates everywhere Microsoft's endless Blunder-gate continues afresh as of yesterday early AM when Microsoft pushed out yet another problematic update, and it erased all of the secretary user's customization made to the 'normal' template in Word 2016 and all of the earlier versions as well. This is a key feature that is used to set up every official business letterhead and official government format used across America."It’s bad enough that Microsoft is so pushy about getting users to upgrade their PCs to Windows 10. These software updates don’t always go as planned, and Microsoft this week released another update that’s wreaking havoc on some versions of Microsoft Word.
If you use Word 2016, the latest version of Microsoft’s word processing app, and install the company’s most recent Windows 10 patch, the update wipes out your “normal” template. That little file, named normal.dotm, is important because it contains all of your macros, autotext blocks, autocorrect entries, styles and more customization options. If that normal.dotm file gets nuked, all of your tweaks and customizations are erased, and you need to recreate them, which is a major pain for folks who use heavily customized templates. Word still works, but the software reverts to its default settings.
Microsoft offers recovery option, but no official fix A Microsoft engineer who monitors the official Office 2016 user forum confirmed the problem and suggested a solution. The good news is you can recover your customizations. However, it’s a fairly complex process. I won’t detail the steps here, but if you hit the link above you’ll find more information on the recovery.
“This was not an intentional change and we (the Word product team) are working to understand both the cause as well as what steps customers can take to either avoid or recover from this,” the Microsoft employee wrote. As of Tuesday evening, no official fix for the update has been released.
Windows 10 often automatically updates itself when Microsoft pushes out patches. To date, the company released one very large update, and a series of smaller patches. The latest patch, called “Windows 10 Cumulative Update KB3124200,” renames the Normal.dotm template, which causes the problem when users restart Word, according to Microsoft.
I’ve seen a few reports that indicated older versions of Word are also affected by the upgrade glitch, but so far Microsoft only confirmed the problem with Word 2016.
If you use any version of Word on a Windows 10 PC, I suggest making a backup of your normal.dotm template before you install any new Windows software updates. You can find your template by navigating to Start > Run, and then pasting %appdata%\Microsoft\Templates into the entry field. Next click OK, and you’ll see the templates.
If you update Windows 10 and it renames your normal template file, replace it with the backup, and you’ll be back in business."Now, why is this "suggested fix" complete and total BS? First, you never know when or where the Windows 10 fruckups are going to strike. Second, no secretary is at work right now on Christmas Eve, so even if you could magically warn them all tWindows 10 Windows 10 he update gremlin would still have wiped their machine out before they could get back to save it. Second, who saves their Normal.dotm template routinely anyway? Get real, MS, you just pissed off the big boss's personal secretary and all the sub-secretaries right on down the food chain, and be sure she will share that ire with all her peers and her bosses lieutenants secretaries all down the food chain to IT's secretaries who are right now telling the IT boys to go get the backup tapes ASAP for every secretary in the company so they can their stuff back together so they can print their bosses stuff on time. Or it's the IT boy's arse that will get reamed. MICROSOFT, YOUR WIN 10 SOFTWARE UPDATE SYSTEM IS COMPLETELY UNRELIABLE AND IS CREATING TOTALLY BUGGY BULLSHITE DISASTERS and believe me secretaries know what to do with stuff they cannot trust from one day to the next. So do the IT boys. Hey MS, you just put one into your own foot, you killed your own Office software. Or was it "an unauthorized incompatible software" that had to be deleted for security reasons? Oh, that excuse doesn't work for Word and the rest of Office, now does it?
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