Why is my “Blank Document” not blank?

To create a new document, you run Word and select ‘New’ from the file menu and then click on “Blank Document” and a blank document opens with the name “Document 1”. You must have created plenty of new documents this way whenever you wanted to add new information in your computer.

But the only problem is that this time your “Blank Document” is just not blank. It contains text from an existing document saved in your drive. How did this happen? Let’s examine.

Every time you write to a new Word document, you are actually building upon a Template which provides you with the basic framework with default font size, type, style and other default settings. This helps you to start your work right away without any need to format each time you have a new document to write to.

The template is always there even if you may have never known about it. You can ever create a new template yourself if you wish. You just have to open a new document and save it with .dot extension to create one.

Your default template is saved with the name Normal.dot. Saving any changes in the formatting or any sort of customization will be saved to your Normal.dot file and to every new document from then on. “Blank Document” doesn’t show as blank because without realizing it, somehow you have saved text from an existing document in the Normal.dot file or you have simply saved a document as Normal.dot.

Though you may not remember having ever done such a thing and that’s quite true we must admit, the hard fact is that it did happen. As to how and when, nobody has any idea. Complicated as it sounds, even a resolution to this involves a bit of complexity.

What you need to do is to open your default template, erase the text it has acquired erratically and resave it to render it blank again. But finding Normal.dot file is not that easy and will require you to either run a routine .dot file search or go to Tools menu, open Options to choose File Locations and search in User Templates.

After finding it, don’t double click but open the file by a right click as double-clicking will again give you the same result--a new “Blank Document” which is not really blank. Delete the text from the file and resave.

It may happen that Word is not able to retrieve Normal.dot file. In that case, it will create a new Normal.dot file and you’ll lose any settings saved earlier in the previous Normal.dot. Don’t get dismayed; you can save the settings to the new template.

Save the old Normal.dot file with a new name transfer the settings by following procedure: click on Templates and Add-ins from Tools menu, again go to Template Organizer option to start transfer.