Office 2007 template location

Upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2007 has been pretty painless so far, but it just took me about five minutes to figure out how to create a new Word document using one of my custom templates. Since the old menu has been replaced by the ribbon, I didn’t know where to set the file location. (I keep my templates within a folder of My Documents rather than the default C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates, because they’re easier to find and back up if they’re in My Documents.)

The instructions for modifying the template file locations are in this Microsoft knowledgebase article. Even with that knowledge, it’s easy to miss what you’re looking for. Once you’ve gotten to the Advanced options in Word, you have to scroll way down to see the General section:

When you click on File Locations, you’ll be back in familiar territory. I changed the templates directory on the User Templates line below: