What Are The Ingredients Of A Good Template In Microsoft Word?

By creating your own templates, you decide what is and isn't necessary, and what elements you want and don't need. Creating and using your own templates can increase productivity and reduce errors, among other benefits.

Letters are probably the most common documents produced using templates, because they have a fairly standard format and are a common document type.

The starting point for a letter template is putting in the template the standard elements of the letter:

Address

Date

Dear ___________

Yours truly/sincerely/faithfully

Your name

One easy trick is to use Word’s ability to update the date automatically. Go to Insert, Select Date and time, choose the format you require and make sure you tick the box that says Automatically update, and your letters will always have the correct date.

To personalize your letters derived from the template, you can produce your own letter head either as text or an image. You can store it in your template as a bitmap inserted into the document. If you have a color printer, you can produce your own color stationery on demand, saving money in the process. To enhance this further, you can add a watermark to your template.

In Word 2003, it works like this. First prepare your background image as your watermark, then go the Format menu and select the Background option. Select the Printed watermark option and then the Picture option. Use the Washout default option to prevent the image overshadowing your text.

Finally, you can scan your own signature and add this to the bottom of your letter template to produce signed letters automatically. I do not recommend this option for legal documents, but for day to day use it is fine. All of this reduces the effort required to produce a letter. It should allow you to spend a bit more time thinking about producing a professional looking letter that projects a positive image. Using a standard template also reduces error rates, reducing time spent on correcting errors and thereby increasing productivity or just leaving more time for coffee.

Some times, a template is primarily used to produce documents with a large percentage of standard text. At other times, it can be used to reduce errors, thereby improving document quality as well as reducing the time spent correcting errors.

This article was first produced in Word using a simple template before importing to Brighthub. The template provides me with two features:

1. It has a series of headings to make sure I include all the sections that I need: Title, Teaser, Terms, SEO title, Summary, SEO Keywords, Series, Main text. This ensures that I do not omit a key section.

2. More importantly, as a British writer, my computer is set to spell check my documents to British spellings. When writing for Brighthub, I have set the language within the template to English (US). This ensures that the computer will flag up for me each time I use colour instead of color, and organise instead of organize. This saves me having to remember to set the language each time.

Using templates to reduce errors is a double winner: it saves you time spent correcting errors and improves the quality of your product. In the next and final article in this series I shall make use of more features including macros forms and mail merge.