I recently have been hit by this problem several times. I'll record a macro, then load normal.dot to edit the macro. But I can't edit the macro, and I receive that error message.

In 2009, I have been hit by this problem several times. After Googling a bit, I did not find much in the way of useful suggestions.

My simple solution:

Do NOT load Word, then try to open normal.dot by browsing to that file. It appears that when Word is loaded first, Word is locking normal.dot so that it can not be edited. The simple solution is to browse to normal.dot, and click on it in Windows Explorer, which will launch Word. Then you can use Tools / Macro / Macros to choose which macro you want to edit.

My brute force solution:

1. Exit Microsoft Word

2. Find a copy of normal.dot which is NOT corrupted (from a recent backup)

3. Go to the templates directory C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

4. Rename the existing normal.dot to normal.bad (just in case)

5. Copy the normal.dot file from the backup into the templates directory

6. Now I was able to edit the macros in my normal.dot file again

Last modified: November 28, 2011