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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T22:05:01+00:00

According to the notes on office .dotm files, they are similar (or the same)

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According to the notes on office .dotm files, they are similar (or the same) in structure to the .docx files – in other words a zip archive.

If I extract the contents of a .dotm file (using an archiving tool), and then recompress the resulting files back into a .dotm file, preserving the structure (file locations) exactly – MSWord2007 complains that the new .dotm file is invalid.

What additional formatting (in detail) for .dotm files is required that the archiving tool does not (by default) or cannot provide?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Used a tool called ‘Infozip’ – which consisted of several executables (zip.exe, unzip.exe, etc) to implement a working solution.

    [-] Extracted the contents of the .dotm file to a temporary folder using unzip.exe
    [-] Made the required changes to relevant files (in this case CustumUI.xml)
    [-] Updated the original archive (.dotm file) by instructing zip.exe to ‘refresh’ the archive – i.e. NOT recompress to a new archive, but update changed files only.

    This seemed to keep the non-standard archive metadata intact while changing the contents of the desired file within the archive.
    MS Word 2007 now opens the macro-enabled template files and applies the changes correctly.

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