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microsoft word templates

Every Microsoft Word document is based upon a Word template. If you start a blank document, Word uses the template named 'Normal' (sometimes refered to as 'Normal dot dot', ie. 'Normal.dot', its full file name).

Starting a new document from an appropriate template is a much quicker way of working than opening an old document and changing its appearance and content.

Significant savings in time and effort result when you come to alter the layout and format of an existing document. Instead of hacking through the document making your alterations, you rejig the template and let that adjust the document for you.

features of a word template

These are some of the features you can include in your template:

Boilerplate text
Formats and styles
Menus and toolbars
Margins
Headers and footers.

If you are preparing long documents - contracts or reports, say - your templates might include:

Tables of content
Tables of figures
Autotext
Boilerplates of things like tables and charts
Spelling and grammar rules
Indexes.

advantages of word templates

If you have an appropriate template, then basing a new document upon that template should save you a lot of preparatory work.

Suites of templates shared by everyone in your business can ensure corporate style, even in documents prepared by relative novices in the use of Word.

But those are not the only advantages: templates can save you a lot of time in reformatting an existing set of documents.

For example, imagine you have many reports in Times New Roman with Arial used for headings, and then you decide to change all the fonts. To slog through each report making the changes would take ages; but driving the changes via the report template should take no more than a minute or two.

templates - return on investment

Templates can bring significant savings other than on the time and effort creating and reformatting documents.

Take the example of an oil company, for a subsidiary of which we helped create a suite of templates for their letters, with compliments slips, memos, reports and forms.

Prior to our involvement, each department and section head had their own letterhead and with comps preprinted on Conqueror paper.

Promotions and office reshuffles meant frequent reprinting. On one occasion we estimated 600 reams of preprinted 100gsm Conqueror were stacked ready for disposal, rendered redundant after an office restructuring. That's about £9,000 in paper alone, before adding the costs of design and printing!

Once our templates were in use, the only preprinting was of the company logo, in colour. The templates took care of the personalised information. This information was easily altered by office staff to reflect changes - no cause to throw away expensive stationery.

As our client came to appreciate the power of templates, as demonstrated through the new approach to letters and with comps, they abandoned all preprinted forms - invoices, orders, estimates and so on - in favour of template-based documents.

templates and macros

Templates in Microsoft Word can act as containers for macros and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) code. Passing others your template will give them access to the macros it contains.

We use macros in our own Word letter template to retrieve names and addresses from our contacts database. Read more