OFF2000: Cannot Add New Document As Hyperlink to Office 2000 Documents After Upgrade to Windows 2000 from Windows 98 (254852)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Excel 2000
  • Microsoft PowerPoint 2000
  • Microsoft Word 2000
  • the operating system: Microsoft Windows 2000
This article was previously published under Q254852

SYMPTOMS

When you click Create New Document and attempt to save a new document in the Insert Hyperlink dialog box of an Office program, you receive the following error message:
An error occurred while trying to create the file.

CAUSE

After you upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, template files required for new document creation are not found in the folders established during the original Office 2000 installation.

WORKAROUND

You can work around this behavior by creating a Shellnew folder in your default Windows folder (usually C:\Winnt), searching for the template files, and copying them to that folder.

If your computer's Windows folder is not C:\Winnt, you can find it by following these steps:
  1. On the Start menu, point to Search, and then click For Files or Folders.
  2. In the Search for files or folders named box, type System.ini and then click Search Now.
  3. In the Search results pane, note the folder containing the System.ini file.
When you have located your Windows folder, follow these steps to restore the templates:
  1. Create a new subfolder in the Windows folder, and name the subfolder Shellnew.
  2. Find the template files by searching as described earlier in this article, this time looking for the file Winword8.doc.
  3. Note the folder containing Winword8.doc, browse to it using Windows Explorer or My Computer, and then copy all of the files in that folder and paste them into the new Shellnew subfolder.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

The Office 2000 installation process creates file templates for several Office document types in a subfolder, named Shellnew, of the Windows folder, and these templates are used to create new documents of those types. For example, some processes that create new Word documents may require the Word template file, which is WinWord8.doc, typically found in the folder C:\Windows\Shellnew.

Upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 automatically moves those template files to new locations, typically C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Templates. This is a new standard folder in Windows 2000 and Office 2000 does not recognize it, so the reference to those templates in the new document creation process fails.

This behavior does not occur on computers that have original installations of Windows 2000, nor does it occur on computers that have been upgraded from Windows NT version 4.
Modification Type:MajorLast Reviewed:11/24/2003
Keywords:kbbug kbfix KB254852
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