Elsewhere in this book, we’ve touched on the concept of templates. Templates are Office files containing style definitions and/or content. Each program has template files, which can be identified by their file extensions, as shown in the following table.
Program | Extension | File types... |
|---|---|---|
Word | .dotx | Word Template |
.dotm | Word Macro-Enabled Template | |
.dot | Word 97–2004 Template | |
Excel | .xltx | Excel Template |
.xltm | Excel Macro-Enabled Template | |
.xlt | Excel 97–2004 Template | |
PowerPoint | .potx | PowerPoint Template |
.potm | PowerPoint Macro-Enabled Template | |
.pot | PowerPoint 97–2004 Template |
You can use a template in two ways:
You can use a template as a starter file by opening the template. This creates a new file based on the template. The new file is not a template file; rather, when you save it, the program will prompt you to save it as a document, workbook, or presentation. (You can save it as a template, but that’s not the default format.)
You can apply the style definitions within a template to an existing file by attaching the template to the file.
In this book, we generally use the term project templates to refer to templates whose primary purpose is as starter files. These include the templates you open from the Project Gallery when you create a Word publication, an Excel ledger sheet, or a pre-populated PowerPoint presentation. We’ve worked with project templates in previous chapters. You can use templates in each of the primary Office programs, in the ways listed on the following page.
When working in Excel, you’ll primarily use templates as starter files for sheets.
In PowerPoint, you’ll use templates both as starter files and to apply different sets of themes and masters to a presentation.
In Word, you can create documents and publications from starter templates. Another great use of document templates, however, is to change the look of document content, and to apply a consistent look to multiple documents, and that’s the way we’re addressing templates in this chapter.
A document template is a separate file in which paragraph, character, table, and list styles are defined. A document template can also include content, page formatting, headers and footers, and any other elements found in a document, but when you’re attaching the template for the purpose of defining styles, that content is neither visible nor pertinent.
Every document you create is based on a document template. Unless you specify otherwise, all new documents are based on the Normal document template, which defines a few fairly plain styles, such as paragraph styles for regular text paragraphs, a title, and different levels of headings; and a few character styles that change the look of selected text. The styles from the Normal template appear in the Styles panel of the Formatting Palette when you create a new blank document. If you create a document based on a different template, the styles defined in that template appear in the Styles panel, and you can apply those styles to quickly format the text in the document.
You can change the look of document content by making changes to the style definitions within the attached template, or you can attach a different template that contains different definitions for the same styles to the document. You can create these additional templates or use templates provided to you by other people.
To create a document template, you simply save a file in the .dotx file format. You can distribute the file to other Word users to attach to their own documents, in the same way that you would distribute any electronic document—for example, by e-mail, through a shared drive, or on a portable disk or drive.
You can make a template available to Word by saving the template to any location and then loading it as a global template, or by saving the template to the standard template directory.
To attach a different template to a document: