Getting Rid of Wizards and Templates

Word provides a range of templates and wizards that can be quite helpful when creating standard types of documents. There may be circumstances, however, when you want to completely (or even selectively) remove the wizards and templates provided with Word.

In all versions of Word, templates and wizards are installed in special folders on your hard drive. The exact location where they are installed varies from version to version, but you can easily find the location by looking at the File Locations tab of the Options dialog box (and seeing where Word looks for templates), or by doing a file search in Windows for files ending in .DOT or .WIZ.

If you are using Word 97, you can simply delete .DOT or .WIZ files that you no longer want or need. If you don't want to delete the files, but simply want to make them "unavailable," you could rename them or move them to a different folder.

You can't do this in Word 2000 or later versions, however. Beginning with Word 2000, the program is "self healing," to a degree. This means that if Word discovers something is missing, it assumes you want it to fix itself. Thus, simply deleting .DOT and .WIZ files (or renaming them) results—more often than not—in Word simply creating the missing or renamed file again.

The way to get rid of them, then, is to tell Word that you don't want them installed on your system. This means that you must run the Word or Office Setup program and specifically set the unwanted templates and wizards to "Not Available." When you complete the installation, Word dutifully removes the templates and wizards you no longer want. As a final step, you should delete the folders that Word created for the templates in the first place. (If you are using other Office applications, their wizards and templates can be stored in the same folder, so make sure it is empty before deleting it.)

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1735) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.