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Creating a Template in MS Word

category: writing, software

I needed a new proposal template. It had been a while since I had created a new template, so I started almost at the beginning. Templates are great for document uniformity and for speed. If you create your template well, it will save you a lot of time.

If you already have a template from which you have been working, as I do, the easiest place to start creating a new template is with the Organizer.

Go to Tools, Templates and Add-ins. In the lower left corner of the Templates and Add-ins dialogue box is the Organizer button. The Organizer dialogue box allows you to select styles from one template and place them into another template with just a click. When you're copying, be careful to pay attention to all the arrows so you always move in the right direction.

Of course, you can modify the styles once they are in the new template, but the Organizer allows you to take advantage of work you have already done.

If you don't have a previous template from which to work, most of your work will start with the Styles and Formatting task Pane. The easiest way to turn it on is the button on the Formatting Tool Bar. The task pane opens to the right of the document window. While you're creating the template, it's probably easiest to leave the task pane open.

I knew my document would have three or four levels of headings, body paragraphs and maybe some bulleted lists mixed in with the body paragraphs.

I also wanted headers and footers on each page. The headers would change in different sections of the document, and the footers would remain the same throughout the document.
From the Styles and Formatting task pane, click on the New Style button to open the New Style dialogue box. You need to give your style a name.

Choose something short that relates to what kind of text the style is formatting. I try to avoid using the names that Word uses to avoid confusion between what I create and all the prepackaged Word stuff. There are four style types, font, paragraph, list, and table. Most styles you create will be paragraph styles. The Style Based On choice is tricky. If you base your style on a style already present in Word, you will save time creating the style as many choices will already have been made. However, if for some reason the style on which your style is based is changed, your newly created style will change too. It's common for weird style changes to occur apparently by magic. For that reason, I usually choose to base new styles on the Normal style. This method takes a little longer the first time around, but you won't spend hours trying to figure out how some weird thing happened to an important document. The next button is critical. It allows you to choose the formatting of the next paragraph. After a heading paragraph, it's likely that you will want a body paragraph. It's also likely that one body paragraph will follow another. This drop down saves you from Word's annoying habit of always running back to the default 12 point Times New Roman.

The rest of the New Style dialogue box is isn't too hard to figure out. You've seen most of the symbols, for text properties, line spacing, and alignment, before as you have tried to format text as you go, without creating styles and templates. If you need formatting choices that don't appear in the New Style dialogue box, click the Format button in the bottom left corner of the dialogue box, and you have quick access to additional formatting properties.

Once you have created your styles, either from scratch or with the help of previous templates and the Organizer, you can start your document. Applying styles is simple, much easier than trying to format as you go. To create a heading, for example, simply type the heading as you want it to appear.

With your cursor anywhere within the heading's paragraph, simply click that style in the Styles and Formatting task pane, and the heading will be formatted according to the style. For all paragraph styles, placing the cursor anywhere within the paragraph will define the style for the entire paragraph.

The only part of the whole template creation process that I found difficult was header text and page numbering. I wanted a title page without a page number, a table of contents numbered with small Roman numerals placed at bottom center, and main document pages with Arabic numerals placed at the top right. I also wanted different header text for each section of the main document. As I fooled around with page numbering, I noticed the check box for numbering the first page, meaning it's easy to leave a number off the first page, the option of choosing to restart page numbering with each new section, and the option of beginning at page zero with Arabic numerals. There has to be some scenario where starting at page zero would be a good option. After a lot of experimenting, evidently I had not numbered enough pages before, I ended up placing the title page in section one, the table of contents in section two, and the first section of the body in section three.
I didn't insert the page number for section one, I formatted section two's page numbers as I wanted them, and I started page numbers at page 1 with Arabic numerals in section three. With headers, Word wants to keep the same header throughout the document. To change the header for each section, select View, Header and Footer. Go to the first page of the second section and unclick the Link to Previous button, fourth button from the right on the Header and Footer toolbar. With Link to Previous unclicked, you can create a new header for each section of the document. If last section's headers pop up unexpectedly in a the new section, check the Link to Previous button.

She said on 10.04.05 @ 12:38 PM CST