Forum Discussion
Word new menu default template tab - organization assets library - registry key
Hi all,
I need some help finding out what the registry key is for Word (and other office applications) so that our users have a good experience.
Use case : As a user I need to open Word, click the File / New menu and have the template tab default to my organisation's sharepoint online organisation assets library. So that I can quickly see my organization's template documents.
In our organisation , because we setup and "organisation assets library", when a user opens Word then goes to the File / New screen there are three tabs that show templates : Office / Personal / <tenant name>
What I want to achieve is for the <tenant name> tab to be open by default NOT office or personal
I know that if I set
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\office\16.0\word\options DWORD: officestartdefaulttab Value: 1
Then Personal is open by default.
I would really appreciate your help finding out what the registry setting is to have the <tenant name> tab open by default.
Many thanks
8 Replies
I had a support case with Microsoft recently that directed me to your post as it was very similar behavior. They were not able to help me as the issue I have is "by design"?!
I am currently on the monthly channel, version 2104 and I have issues with the Office Templates being stored in SharePoint.
I did make an intune policy to hide the "Office-provided templates" (see attachment) and configured the "Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryUrl https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/assets/templates -OrgAssetType OfficeTemplateLibrary". This SPOOrgAssetsLibrary cmdlet works as expected (I placed the templates on the root of the Sharepoint document library, so I avoid having the user navigate through folders).
Here is the configuration used in Intune (probably there's a similar GPO for it?):
While that works, there seems to be a bug with Office client apps (all our 100 something machines have this behavior):
The issue is when that there are no "Office-provided" templates, I would expect to see the templates as soon as a user clicks on the "New" section (making the templates 1 click away), but It doesn't show any templates.
To see the templates, I need to tell the users that they need to:
1- Open word
2- Go to "New" (which shows nothing the first time)
3- Click on "Home" (or some other screen)
4- Go to "New" again.
The second time they see the "New" screen, the templates magically pop-up as intended (see screenshot).
While the templates work as expected and are hosted in SharePoint, having to tell users that "you need to click on new 2 times" is not so nice.
Hope this helps you (and maybe someone knows how to fix my issue as well).
- I'm having the exact same issue!
We had to enable the office provided templates back as it would be less clicks and less confusing.
I really believe this is a bug that should be fixed as it does not refresh when hitting the "New" button for the first time.
😞
Pedro99 thanks so much for your full explanation. Interesting that the MS team direct you to this post even though it didn't have an answer. But you have figured one out which is AWESOME!
Like you I think the bug will drive my users crazy, but it gets us one step closer.
I think that it is either a bug related to the state of the button in the code AND OR word caching the info about each template.
Great work and thanks for sharing this method.
Dorje-McKinnon please let me know if you do implement this solution and if you experience the same as I do.
I felt quite frustrated by not getting the help I expected from the MS support team, but seems like we'll have to wait on this
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To add some more detail, the "Organization Assets Library" is a relatively new option available to organisations with a 365 tenant
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/organization-assets-library
It allows the creation of a single SharePoint online library to store the organisation's Office Templates.
We have this setup for our tenant.
This question is trying to more tightly link desktop Office applications to this template library, by having the default open template tab be this rather than the Office or Custom tabs.
- Have you found a solution ? We have the same problem , with Office online it works, with desktop app o365 pro plus organization tab not visible
