What Is a Template?

Templates provide a pattern and tools for creating a variety of workbooks. If you read about the Word or FrontPage templates in Chapters 7 and 35, you already know how simple templates enable you to generate attention-getting and helpful documents and Webs. Not only do templates provide an initial design for the worksheets inside your Excel workbooks, templates also help you create workbooks that are consistent and you can do so quicker than creating them from scratch. If you create a weekly expense report and you don't want to re-create the entire report each week, you can save one of your reports as a customized template and then insert new numbers in the basic format each week.

Each newly created workbook must be based on a template. When you create a new workbook, Excel bases it on the default template called WORKBOOK.XLT.