Templates

A template is nothing more than a formatted outline of a document. Suppose that you follow a monthly budget, and you prepare monthly statements to follow. You like to include your savings account interest calculations, so you determine that Excel will function well as the creation tool for your statements.

When you create your monthly statements, you have three options:

• Create each monthly budget from scratch.

• Modify a saved monthly budget to change the details for each subsequent statement.

• Create a monthly budget template and fill in the details for each statement.

Obviously, the first option requires the most work. Why create a new statement for each budget, adding the titles, date, time, details, summaries, creditors, and new investment information if many of those details remain the same from statement to statement?

The second option is not a bad idea if the statements are fairly uniform in design and require only slight formatting and detail changes. Some people feel more comfortable changing an existing statement's details than creating statements from scratch or using a template. New Office users might prefer to change an existing statement until they get accustomed to Office's programs.

Although templates are great for Office newcomers, you do not always want to start with them. Sometimes, it's easier to understand an Office program if you create your first few data files (documents, databases, electronic worksheets, and so on) from scratch.

When you get used to Office, however, you discover that the template method makes the most sense for repetitive statement creation. The template literally provides a fill-in-the-blank statement. You don't have to format the same information from statement to statement, and you're guaranteed a uniform appearance.