A Windows 10 patch can cause trouble for Office 2010, 2013 and 2016 for Windows users. Yet another faulty update from Microsoft in recent months.
“It’s like deja-vu all over again”
This time it’s a Windows 10 update called KB3124200 – a rollup of various patches into a single download. The update is supposed to provide ‘improved functionality’ for Windows 10 – which tells customers absolutely nothing.
For reasons beyond imagining, the patch can rename the key normal.dotm and normalemail.dotm template files! That means any document settings, styles, Autotext, Autocorrents, macros you’ve changed will disappear. Grrrr. And any email defaults used in Outlook are also ‘MIA’ because Word is the email editor and uses normalemail.dotm.
According to Microsoft, Office 2016, Office 2013 and Office 2010 are affected. We suspect anyone with Office 2007 can also get caught (because it also uses normal.dotm). But only with Windows 10 – Windows 8.1, 8 and 7 users can rest easy.
This was elementary, well known and entirely avoidable – yet Microsoft still managed to do it.
If this has happened to you, the fix is simple and detailed below.
Notes: much of the early coverage of this bug has overlooked that there are TWO affected templates. It’s not just the Word normal.dotm file that’s changed, also the Normalemail.dotm template used by Outlook.
Buried deep in Microsoft’s paltry KB response is the admission that Office 2016, Office 2013 and Office 2010 are all affected — not just Office 2016.
Background
Normal.dotm (like normal.dot before it) is the base for most Word documents. It’s where most default settings for a document are saved and used for new documents. If Word can’t find normal.dotm, it will make a new one from the Microsoft defaults which loses any changes you’ve made.
Normal.dotm isn’t an important part of Microsoft Word … it’s absolutely vital. Same goes for normalemail.dotm.
It’s hard to understand why a Windows 10 patch is tinkering with normal.dotm and its companion at all. Doing that should have raised all sorts of red flags in the Windows team, who can’t be ignorant of the importance of normal.dotm’s to the other major Microsoft product. They should have either left normal.dotm/normalemail.dotm alone or made damn sure that they were restored properly.
Some patch troubles can be understandable given the complexities involved and we try to cut Microsoft some slack. But this was elementary, well known and entirely avoidable – yet Microsoft still managed to do it. And now they are messing up the response with obfuscation and incomplete advise (see our commentary and warnings below about the ‘fix’ KB article)
The Knowledge Base article about the patch, as is usual for Microsoft, makes no mention of the trouble that the patch can cause. The only ‘official’ mention is in the Microsoft ‘Answers’ forum which, in our view, doesn’t count as proper notification … that’s what the Knowledge Base is supposed to be for and where most customers go for help. There is a KB article with details of the fix, but there’s no mention of why the fix is needed (because that would be admission of a fault by Microsoft).
Don’t get us started about this … there are so many ways that this is a dreadful mistake by Microsoft. Apologists are already saying Microsoft has been ‘unlucky’ with updates lately but it’s not bad luck, it’s corporate hubris with customers suffering the consequences.
Fixing the KB3124200 bug
Luckily, the Windows 10 update doesn’t remove normal.dotm nor normalemail.dotm , it just renames them to normal.dotm.old normalEmail.dotm.old (that’s the name in most cases). So all you need to do it rename them back.
- Close Word (and Outlook, see below)
- Go to the default templates folder. Press Win + R (Run) and type in
%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates
That will open a Windows Explorer window at the right folder.
Read Dan H reminds us (and Microsoft): “%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates only works if the user has not modified the template location in File | Options | Advanced | General | File Locations. ”
Before you go any further, you’ll need to see the file extensions (View | Show/hide ). This is off (checked) by default though we recommend you make them visible in Windows 10 for Microsoft Office users (Configuration chapter, Explorer options. Page 51 of the 1st edition).
(this is from an unaffected computer so the ‘Date Modified’ entries won’t match a system messed up by Microsoft’s update)
The more cautious among you might decide, before proceeding with the next steps, to make a copy of all the template files to a temporary folder. Just so you have a backup before making changes.
- Look at the ‘Date modified’ for Normal.dotm. It should be the time when Word started and could not find your normal.dotm. Just to be careful, don’t delete it, rename it to something like
NormalMadebecauseofMicrosoftsmistake.dotmor some other memorable name <g>. - Now find the template file that the patch messed up. It should be called
Normal.dotm.old– make a copy and rename it toNormal.dotm - Restart Word and make sure your defaults are now back in place.
Do the same steps again for NormalEmail.dotm but first, make sure Outlook is fully shut down as well as Word.
The long version
Microsoft has published a long version of the above fix, But you would not know that the instructions are for fixing a Microsoft mistake.
Headed Missing customizations in Office Word after an update, there is absolutely NO mention of what causes the ‘missing customizations’ in the first place. No link to the buggy original patch or other details. There’s an oblique mention to “the latest update for Microsoft Office (6366.xxxx)” which clearly isn’t right because the faulty update is for Windows 10 and multiple versions of Office are affected (as confirmed later on the same KB page).
This is typical Microsoft. Having made a mistake, the first priority is to minimize the blame and add a layer of obfuscation.
What’s worse, the KB3129969 article is incomplete, literally half-done!
There’s no mention of the NormalEmail.dotm file that also needs fixing. So the current ‘fix’ KB article is only half done.
(we have a copy of “Article ID: 3129969 – Last Review: 12/22/2015 18:03:00 – Revision: 1.0” which may be fixed by the time you read it).
KB3129969 says you have to hide file extensions again after fixing the templates, but you don’t. Most experienced Windows users leave extensions visible.
Here’s the key part of long version of the above fix, as supplied by ‘Rob L’ from Microsoft (kudos to Rob). Rob has given more details on identifying the template to restore (see our bolded text), when you’re faced with various templates to choose from.
- Rename the “Normal.dotm” file to “NormalBeforeRestore.dotm”. You can rename the file by right-clicking it, selecting “Rename,” and typing in the new name.
Now we have to determine which file to restore. The issue we identified typically results in a file called “Normal.dotm.old”, but under some circumstances, there could be other saved versions of your Normal template in that directory as well.
You should see at least one of the following: “Normal.dotm.old”, “NormalPre”, “NormalPre15”, “NormalOld”, or “OldNormal”. If you see more than one of these files, then you will need to choose the correct file to restore; this is likely the file with the most recent “Date modified” value, which should be “Normal.dotm.old”. Don’t worry if you choose the wrong one, you can repeat steps 4-6 as many times as necessary to find the right file.
