AbiWord currently doesn't recognize ".dot" as an extension that means
anything. Its default fall-back routing in such a situation is to
assume it's plain text, and read it as such. If, though, the file
has an extension of ".doc", it goes ahead with a word import. I'm not
very keen on the exact differences between word documents and templates
(I know they share a similar format). Someone from the wv team could
probably give more detail on how Word's templates can be parsed.
In the future, AbiWord will add support for Microsoft Word document
templates. Right now it has no such feature, so it wouldn't know
what to do with the file. Until then, apparently it sounds as though
importing them (if only to grab their textual content) is somewhat
working. :)
-- Shaw Terwilliger