Create a Shortcut to Quickly Open a New Word Document

Many years ago, when I first began to dabble with Microsoft Office 2007 it was pretty easy to start working with a new document. All you had to do is launch Microsoft Word from its Start Menu shortcut and it started with a new document. You could quickly start typing whatever you wanted in your new Word document. But starting with Office 2010 everything changed. Now if you want to create a new Word document, you have to launch Microsoft Word, click on File, then New and then choose one of the templates. This can quickly become annoying if you have to do this multiple times every day.

Fortunately, there is a simple workaround to this problem – you can create a shortcut script to open a new Word document in just a one double-click. Since Word offers Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting, our task becomes much easier. Here is how you can create a script shortcut to quickly open Word with new document already open waiting for you to begin typing:

1. Download new-document-word2016.zip and save it on your computer.
2. Extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP file to your Windows desktop. You can use a tool like WinRAR or PeaZip to extract the contents of a ZIP archive.
3. Now you would have a file named new-word-doc.vbs on your Windows desktop. Double-clicking on this file shall open Microsoft Word loaded with a new document.
4. The new document in Word is opened using the default template. If you want to start Word with a new document with a certain template, then you can edit the new-word-doc.vbs file using Windows Notepad and add the full path of the template enclosed inside double-quotes.

Conclusion: If you have to work with many new Word documents on a daily basis and are really annoyed by the lengthy way of creating a new Word document in Microsoft Word 2013 or 2016, then you can just use a Visual Basic script shortcut to make things easier for you.