There have been several reports of “printing problems” in MS Word reported over the last couple of months. After much research and testing, I believe that I have been able to determine the probable cause of these problems and a potential fix.

Microsoft Word is highly customizable program. The problem arises when changes are made to the default printer settings without the user knowing this has happened. This could be interpreted as a “corruption”, but if used as designed, it really is a feature. To better understand how to avoid this problem, users need to better understand one of the basic processes of the MS Word program. Word maintains a file called normal.dot. This is a template file – the basic pattern that Word uses every time that it starts a new blank document. This file can be customized if, for example, users always print to non-standard size paper or wanted specific margins or tabs.

The “problem” appears to be caused by changes being made to this normal.dot template. My guess is that there are one or more documents “floating around” where the template has been changed and the current user inadvertently updates their own normal.dot to match.

Download pdf Microsoft Word Printing Issues