Backing Up Your Word Options

Microsoft Word stores options and personal customizations in several different places. It's a good idea to back these up periodically, in case you ever have to reinstall Word, or one of the files gets corrupted or deleted.

These instructions are for Word 2013 but should work for other recent versions of Word.

normal.dotm

Many of Word’s options and configuration settings are stored in the template file, normal.dotm. It is also the default container for any macros that you create.

The default location for normal.dotm is: [YourDrive]:\My Documents\Templates.

You should back up this file frequently. A corrupt normal.dotm file is one of the most common causes of problems with Word.
You can delete normal.dotm at any time and Word will create a new version when you restart it.

Key Assignments

Word allows you to customize the keystrokes used to invoke commands and apply paragraph and character formatting, but offers no way to back them up. The best you can do is to print out a list of your custom key assignments.

To print out a list of custom key assignments:

1. Choose File > Print. The Print page opens.
2. In the Settings section, click Print What Pages. From the menu that appears, select Key Assignments.
3. Click OK. The list is printed.

Ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar customizations

You can back up customizations that you have made to the ribbon and the Quick Access toolbar (QAT), but you have to do both together. AFAIK, there is no way to backup just ribbon customizations or Quick Access toolbar customizations.

To back up your ribbon and QAT customizations:

1. In the File tab, click Options. The Word Options dialog box opens.
2. In the left pane, click either Customize Ribbon or Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
3. Below the right list of options click Import/Export.
4. From the menu that appears choose Export all customizations. A File Save as dialog box opens.
5. Save the file. By default, the file name is WordCustomizations.exportedUI, but you can choose any file name you want.

To restore your saved customizations, follow steps 1 to 3, then in step 4 choose Import customization file.