Does portable hard drive with word documents not close

sumospim Windows 10 Office 2019

Hi all and hope you are keeping safe.

I have a weird issue here that is really doing my head in.

My partner works as a teacher and she has to save docs on an external hard drive.

Issue is, that when at school she can open her saved word docs from the external drive with no issue, which is connected to her school laptop.

When back at home, the docs will just not open from the same external connected to her work laptop.

I did hours of research yesterday and to no avail.

Connecting the external drive to my personal laptop and the docs open with no issue.

There is an added issue, which I have no idea if connected or not, is that on opening Word on her school laptop, there is the popup of " we're sorry. we can't open normal.dotm". Shutting the warning and Word does open but then i can't save a test file.

Am I missing something obvious?

Any advice/ thoughts greatly appreciated!

gmayor Windows 10 Office 2019

Because of the way Word handles temporary files, you should never save its documents to removable media. Always save to the local hard drive and COPY to the removable media. Similarly always copy to the hard drive and open the document there.
The normal template issue on the school laptop suggests a number of things, but the most logical one is that the lock file associated with the normal template has been orphaned. Close Word completely and see
What to do when Word crashes
If the original normal template is deleted or better still renamed, Word will create a new one with default settings.
If you have not changed the default location enter or copy
%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates
to the address window of Windows File Explorer and you will be taken to the folder that contains the default template normal.dotm. Note that this folder is normally hidden.
You may find  Save in two places useful.

__________________
Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
Visit my web site for more programming tips and ready made processes www.gmayor.com

sumospim Windows 10 Office 2019

Hi gmayer and many thanks for reply
Interestingly, I had already done your suggestion re normal.dotm but it is not creating a new one on opening.
Maybe it would when she is in the school environment, rather than at home..

Stefan Blom Windows 10 Office 2019

Interestingly, I had already done your suggestion re normal.dotm but it is not creating a new one on opening.
Maybe it would when she is in the school environment, rather than at home..

Typically, the Normal template won't be recreated on disk until after you have changed any of its factory default settings. For example, Normal will be saved if you modify the default font for new, blank documents.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

sumospim Windows 10 Office 2019