I would like for it to be even easier -- that is, I want a shortcut on my desktop I can open and Word will know I want this short story format -- and technically this is working too, but I'd like a nicer way.

I did this because I was wanting a format for writing a whole book, which would do contents, index, etc. This was as far as I could get in one evening!

Here it is: http://youwillknow.blogspot.com (entry on MS Word format).

http://www.hatrack.com/forums/writers/forum/Forum6/HTML/000001.html

I did have an automatic word count thing going on, but I took it out since it was a simple matter to manually look it up in Word or calculate. And at the time, I wasn't sure which method of word counting would be best, i.e. based on Word's on word calc or on the traditional 250 words per page method, so I simply took it out to allow for author preference. But I used a section break right after the Title to allow for counting only the words in the manuscript body, which avoided writing a formula to subtract the address field and story title words.