Opened Word and the cursor is at the top & not were is should be. Tried to reset by going to Page Layout, Margins and setting to 2" on all sides. This will not work. Closed Word.

Did a HD search for Normal.dotm. Double clicked on this and same thing showed up. Renamed to 1Normal.dotm and redid document the way is should be and saved. Opened Word again, samething.

When I did search and found Normal.dotm the icon has a yellow what looks like a sheet of paper with a ! on it.

Opened Word and the cursor is at the top & not were is should be. Tried to reset by going to Page Layout, Margins and setting to 2" on all sides. This will not work. Closed Word.

Did a HD search for Normal.dotm. Double clicked on this and same thing showed up. Renamed to 1Normal.dotm and redid document the way is should be and saved. Opened Word again, samething.

When I did search and found Normal.dotm the icon has a yellow what looks like a sheet of paper with a ! on it.

The file extension is incorrect. Try renaming the file to one of the following names:

Normal.doc
Normal.docx

Perhaps you should open it and save it as a .docx format. Also as caperjack pointed out only Word 2007 and later may open this format.

google shows a .dotm as a word doc with a embedded macro .this may help ,not positive though .
http://www.word-tips.com/dotx-and-dotm.html

I agree 100%.
But now how do I delete the embedded macro and get Normal.dotm the way I want it. I have tried to delete Normal.dotm, open another document the works right. Delete the info in the file & make sure format is correct. Then save as default document. Open Word and the cursor is still in the wrong place which is at top of page and margin format will not change to 1" from top.

Perhaps you should open it and save it as a .docx format. Also as caperjack pointed out only Word 2007 and later may open this format.

As I stated in later post tried that. I have tried to take a Normal.dotm from my other computer and copy it to this computer. Open Word and the cursor is still at top of page where it does not belong. This means that there must be some other problem. Maybe another file being opened. I do not know because I am not a programmer. If there is another file, where is it??
This might have been a Word 2007 problem at the time but I have it now.

what i don't understand is why Word opens to normal.dotm,when you click on the word icon it should open to a new document called document1,and the cursor would be at the top left,about a inch from side and top , and when you hit save as, it will show default name of doc1.dotx.

who created the normal.dotm file you are trying to work with

what i don't understand is why Word opens to normal.dotm,when you click on the word icon it should open to a new document called document1,and the cursor would be at the top left,about a inch from side and top , and when you hit save as, it will show default name of doc1.dotx.

who created the normal.dotm file you are trying to work with

I do not know. After I installed Office things worked just fine. Did not change Normal.dotm that I know of. One day I opened Word and have been having this problem since. And yes Word opens with Document_1 file name.
I have this computer set up w/ three users, Admin, Terry & Dennis. When I go into Admin & open Word, the document is just fine. Same in Terry also. Dennis is the only place I am having a problem.
Had a friend send me his Normal.dotm and that would not work eather. When I looked @ email I saw the icon with a ! in yellow scroll.
I am thinking I am going to have to uninstall Office, defrag HD & reinstall.
What does your icon look like for Normal.dotm?

ok i found it also read a bit about the file and its purpose.
found mine in this location .the icon has the ! ,but when i click on it opens word ,and all is ok .
C:\Users\myusername\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates
also a normalold.dotm ,click on it and it opens word ok also .


i read if you delete the file ,office will recreate it next time you open Word,you just loose any changes you made to word defaults
http://www.pcdon.com/word-unstable-corrupted-normal-dot.html

Did a HD search for Normal.dotm. Double clicked on this and same thing showed up. Renamed to 1Normal.dotm and redid document the way is should be and saved. Opened Word again, samething.

The file extension is incorrect. Try renaming the file to one of the following names:

Normal.doc
Normal.docx

I just did another search of my HD for norm*.do* and found Normal.dotm in the \Microsoft\Templates file. That means that Normal.docx in not a template file and it would not open when Word opened.

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