How to create a company template in Word 2016
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Hi there, in this video tutorial we're going to look at creating a company template. We've gone through them, we've styled this report in previous tutorials, we like it, what we want to do is make sure that we can save a version of it that the next person can use, or say you're designing it as a designer for a company, you want to give it to them, but you don't want them to be able to override the original.
What we're going to do is we're going to go to 'File', 'Save As', and we're going to save something called-- up the top here, we're going to pick this one here called 'Word Template'. Essentially all it does, it means that it's going to be a document that can't be saved over the top of it. We need to give it a name, we'll call this one 'Report Template', make sure it's a 'docx', hit 'Save', and what ends up happening is if I close this down now, and I’ll find it-- Word puts it in by default, it's in your 'Documents', and it puts it into this one called 'Custom Office Templates', and here is the 'Report Template' I've got.
Now, this thing here probably-- yes, copy it out and put it on to the network drive if you’ve got one, and this is what people will use to get started. Now the cool thing about it is if they start, say they try to open up, what ends up happening is, it actually-- can you see, it says Document1 along the top, it's not actually that report template, it's kind of used that to start a new document. It's all sort of editable in here, but it just means that if I save this and close it, that report template is still untouched.
Let's say you do need to update the template. The client comes back, some changes, or you need some changes, you can 'right click' it, and by default it says 'New', you can 'right click' it and say 'Open'. What that will do, that's very different, it's opened the report template, and I can make adjustments to this template and close it back down.
One last thing we'll do before we go is, you can double click it to open a new document like this, but what you might do is 'File', 'New', and in 'New' here there's lots of different templates. These are the ones supplied by Word. Now, this one here says 'Personal', these are the ones we've made. This is our report template, and we can start from here as well. We end with the same effect, so we got a new clean document to start working on, doesn't really matter if you double click the file, or go to 'File', 'New'.
All right, that is how to create a template using Microsoft Word.