If it’s not a patch issue, then I don’t know why it I can’t get it to work on my setup. I can only guess that it’s the patch, or I’m dumb…

And yes, it is working. I click on the New icon on toolbar, and I get the new document with the new color scheme.

Maybe it use the workbook here.
C:WINDOWSShellNew
This workbook is used when you right click on the desktop and
choose New Excel worksheet.

Are you guys sure? I get the same behavior as Dick regardless of whether the Book.xlt is within the XLStart or the AltXLStart directory. Is there anything else that you guys are doing here? If not, then I wonder if some sort of patch or update may have caused this? I’m using ’11.6355.6360′, which seems to be the same as Dick’s. Out of curiousity, what version are you guys on?

Dick,

I cannot test 2002 currently, but I definately get the same behavior as you in Excel 2003. To be honest, I never liked the extra clicks required to use the Task Pane anyway. The older ‘New’ control (ID=2520) does utilize the Book.xlt natively, but Excel does not seem to trust it regardless of whether it resides in the XLStart or the AltStartup so if the book.xlt contains any macros (which mine does) then the user is forced to choose ‘Enable’ from the dialog box, which is rather annoying. My solution is to remove the ‘New…’ control (ID=18) and/or ‘New’ control (ID=2520) from the File menu and replace it with a custom control button that uses VBA to call Workbooks.Add(Template:=”Book.xlt”) and simply give it “New” for the caption. This is very easy to execute and seamless to the user.

In Excel 2007, if the book.xlt is ignored, then I guess we’d have to hook (or “repurpose”) the File > New > Blank Workbook control and use code to directly open the Book.xlt, similar to how I described above. In theory this should not be a big deal to do, but until Excel 2007 is out “for real”, I am personally not likely to be messing with the CustomUI XML much.

I assume that you have various XLStart-folders on your system.

Make sure that book.xlt (and perhaps sheet.xlt) is in the presently used XLStart folder.

This code shows you the correct path of XLStart-Folder:

Sub Show_StartupPath()
MsgBox Application.StartupPath
End Sub

We had the same problem with this solution in a german-forum.

Regards,
Beate

I liked the built in templates that shipped with office 97/2000

Ex the Sales invoice template/Purchase order template etc – was from Village software – had data tracking feature built in

In XP/2003 the data tracking addin was not shipped with the box…had to be downloaded from MS
Also the Invoice templates there are quite feature less…..

Is the template wizard with data tracking – supported in 2007….

I always wondered why this addin was not modified using ADO to write data to a closed file…rather than opening the database file to update data…

In XP the “file search” option was integrated to the “new workbook”, Getting started etc…

In office 2003 its sperate… You can switch from the file search mode to other modes but not vice versa…

Also I found the file search to be quite eratic.

Ex : If you specify a file type as Excel file. and tried to search for a file with file name containing some text (ex : sam) It will list all files, Excel and non excel which have sam in the file name…. This was some thing that was not happening in XP….may be its an ehancement..in 2003