In addition to using the Project Gallery templates, you can create your own. If you routinely create the same type of document, such as a monthly financial report, you can create and format the document once and then save it as a template on which to base future versions of that type of document. You can save your new template with text in it, which is handy if you create many documents with only slight variations. Or you can delete the text so that a document based on it will open as a new, blank document with the styles already defined and ready to apply to whatever content you enter.
To save even more time, you can create a document based on one of the project templates, modify it—for example, by adding your own name and address—and then save the modified project template with a different name. The next time you need to create this type of document, you can use your personalized version rather than the standard project template. You can save the content and formatting of any document as a custom project template that you can use to create other, similar documents. Project templates you create and save in the Project Gallery are available from the My Templates category.
In this topic, we discuss creating a custom project template by using a Word notebook as an example, but you can follow the same steps with any type of Office file.
To save the active document as a project template:
On the File menu, click Save As.
In the Save As dialog box, enter a generic name for the template in the Save As box. Then in the Format list, click Word template (.dotx).
Note
If you want people who are running older versions of Word to be able to use the template, click Word 97–2004 Template instead.
The folder in the Where box changes to My Templates.
In the Save As dialog box, click Save.
Tip
If you and other members of your organization frequently create standard documents such as newsletters, you can establish and maintain consistency across the organization by developing and distributing custom project templates. Templates that you save in the Word Template format can be opened in Word 2008 for Mac and Word 2007 for Windows.
Custom templates saved in your My Templates folder are available to you from the My Templates list in the Project Gallery. By default, your My Templates folder is located in this folder:
~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/
The My Publication Templates and My Themes folders are also at this location. This is obviously not an easy path to follow, but you probably won’t have a reason to. However, if someone else sends you a custom template, save it to this folder so you can access it from the Project Gallery.