Changing the View in File New

When you select New from the File menu, you see the New dialog box. There are three different views in this dialog box, which can be selected by choosing one of the three buttons in the upper-right corner. The default view is the large icons view. For your usage of Word, you may wish a different view to be shown by default. Unfortunately, this is not one of the settings that Word remembers.

You can, however, use a little macro ingenuity to make Word do what you want. If you are using Word 6 or Word 95, choose Macro from the Tools menu. This displays the Macro dialog box. In the Macro Name field, enter the name FileNew (notice there are no spaces in the name). When you do this, Word automatically fills out a description for the macro. This is because FileNew is the name of a built-in command; the one that is initiated when you choose New from the File menu. Word allows you to change what these built-in commands do.

When you click on the Create button, the Macro dialog box disappears and the macro editor is invoked. Notice, however, that the editor already has a macro in it:

Sub FileNew()
   Dialogs(wdDialogFileNew).Show
End Sub

This is the step followed when you choose New from the File menu. If you make changes to this macro, then your modified steps will be followed instead. Change the default code to the following:

Sub FileNew()
   Set myDialog = Dialogs(wdDialogFileNew)
   myDialog.Update
   SendKeys "%3"
   Button = myDialog.Show
   If Button <> 0 Then
      myTemp = myDialog.Template
      Documents.Add Template:=myTemp
   End If
End Sub

Now close the macro editor. The next time (and every time thereafter) that you choose New from the File menu, the files will be listed using the detail view instead of the large icon view.