Default Units that Change

Martyn likes to use millimeters as his default measurement unit in Word. So, he displays the General tab of the Options dialog box (or the Advanced area of the Word Options dialog box, if he were using Word 2007), and sets the default units according to his preference. The problem is, a few days later those default units can change to something else, such as points. Martyn wonders why this occurs and how he can make his preference stick.

There are a couple of things that can be tried. First, open the Normal.dot template. (Open the template directly, using the Open dialog box.) With the template open, set the default measurement unit and then save the template. Then close and restart Word. Unless you later change the Normal.dot template, the default measurement units should remain the same for all your new documents.

This brings up the second possible problem area--working with documents configured differently. It seems that the default measurement units are stored on a document-by-document basis. This means that if you have any documents configured to use a different default measurement unit, or if you open a document sent to you by someone else and they don't use the same measurement unit as you, then you can find that you are all of a sudden working with different units.

The solution to this problem is to create an AutoOpen macro that sets your default measurement units. Something as simple as this could work:

Sub AutoOpen()
    Options.MeasurementUnit = wdMillimeters
End Sub