MS Word Merge Template Issue

dchenkin — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:37:05 GMT

TM 10.0 SP3

Windows /SBS 2011

Clients = Win7 and XP

I have an interesting problem that is not specifically a Time Matters issue but I am hoping someone may have some advice.

Over the years I have created numerous MS Word Merge Templates. Using these templates has made creating of motions, discovery demands, responses, and the like very convenient and of course consistent firm wide. The templates were originally created with Word 97, 2000, or 2003.

Recently we upgraded two clients to 64 bit Win7 machines with MS Office 2010. When merged documents are created on those clients, older clients’ w/XP and Word 2003 cannot open the file. What happens on the older client is a window opens asking the user to select the proper coding to convert the file. This has not been a problem with clients that are 64 bit Win 7 and have Office 2007.

When setting up these new clients I originally had Word 2010 default save as docx. Thinking there was an issue here I installed the latest file conversion utility from Microsoft, but that made no difference. I then changed the default save to .doc files but even that didn’t work. What I discovered in troubleshooting the problem was that if I go to the new client, open the newly merged document and do a Save As and save it as a .doc then the file can be opened on the older clients. In the course of my troubleshooting I also discovered that Word documents created via the clipboard do not suffer this same odd issue. I then tried opening a merge template on the new client and doing a Save As to a .doc file but that did not solve my problem.

I am hoping that someone else has come across this and found a solution that I am not thinking of.

Thanks,

David Chenkin

Paralegal

Marshall & Marshall

Jericho, NY