If your experiencing the irritating Microsoft Office Word 2010 won’t save and remember changes when setting document defaults for your default template via the ‘Set As Default‘ for fonts, margins, etc – you may have just found an answer to your problem!

This problem can happen on both an old and brand new install of Microsoft Office and is caused by Add-ins, commonly PDF-creators. I am currently aware that this can be experienced both with Adobe’s PDFMaker and PDF Complete.

In order to make the changes and save your new template you must first disable the suspected Add-in.

For this you must go to: File -> Options -> Add-Ins

Click the Go button at the bottom of the page

You should be shown a list of installed Office Add-in’s. You can un-tick the Add-In which is causing the problem in order to disable the Add-in. Then click the Ok button to apply your new settings.

Make the desired changes you would like to your template and set them as default. I would recommend next closing Word and re-opening it to ensure your changes have been updated. Your changes should have been remembered and you can now re-enable the Add-in which caused your problem, no after effects should be caused by the Add-in. Re-enable the Add-in using the same technique as before.

File -> Options -> Add-Ins

Go

Tick the Add-In which you wish to re-enable, then click the Ok button to apply your new settings.