Creating Your Own Template

You can save yourself lots of time by saving your favorite workbook as a template. Simply take an existing Excel workbook, get it to look the way you want for a template form, and then create a template from it.

For example, suppose you have a sales report that you update monthly. You can delete all the numbers that change in the worksheet, leaving the column and row headings intact. Then save the sales worksheet as a template. The next time you want to use the sales worksheet, open the sales template worksheet and just fill in the numbers . It's as easy as pie!

In the next exercise, you prepare the Summary worksheet in the Sales 1st Qtr workbook (the workbook you last used in Hour 5, "Letting Excel Do the Math") for a template form. You need to delete the numbers and keep the column and row headings.

To Do: Create a Template

1. To open the Sales 1st Qtr workbook, which contains the Summary worksheet, click the Open button on the Standard toolbar. The Open dialog box appears.

2. To select the file, double-click on Sales 1st Qtr.xls . The sales workbook appears in the Excel window. Notice that the worksheet contains column and row headings and data.

3. Select the range that contains the data you want to delete; in this case, select the range B4:D8.

4. Press Delete. Now press the right arrow key to deselect the range. The data disappears. You want to keep the title, column headings, row headings, and date (see Figure 6.5). Now the worksheet is ready to be saved as a template (as explained in the next section).

   Figure 6.5. The worksheet without numbers, with the title, column headings, and row headings, ready for the template form.