I want to start this article by asking you to use your imagination. Maybe you’re in your home office, or even working in a corporate office somewhere. One of your coworkers comes up to you asking you to create a business flyer, invoice, company memo, or any other complex document. What do you do? Here are some choices. Will you:

1. Stammer and mumble something about needing to go to the bathroom.
2. Just fire up office and go to town designing the document yourself. “Man, what a showoff!”
3. Totally change the subject and ask them out for drinks after work, hoping they will just forget about the stupid documents.
4. Snap your fingers and tell them you can indeed create that stupid … uh … I mean document for you . No problem at all.

If you answered B. You can probably stop right here as you don’t need templates. If you answered D, you are in the right place and I’m glad you made it! If you answered either A or C, all I can say to that is, you should never work, eat, or drink with a full bladder, and if you’re buying drinks after work, you should have asked me first. OK already, enough with the funny business. Let’s get to work.

What Are Templates?

An office template is a pre-designed document in Microsoft Word, Excel, or Power Point, that has all of the layout built for you. Let’s pretend you’re creating a resume. When you open one of these templates, you will get the following placeholder text:

Your Name

Address, City, ST ZIP Code | Telephone | Email

The name and address lines are “placeholder text”, meaning that when these are selected and you begin typing your info, the “your name” text gets replaced  with your real name. Not only does it get replaced, but it has formatting and spacing alinement properties already set. When you click these placeholders, or arrow over them, they will be selected for you. Once you type, you will replace them with your info.

Example Templates

The following was collected from the template samplers in Microsoft Office.

Business

Birthday

Label

How Do I Get Templates for Office?

The templates listed here can just be downloaded. However, if you’d like to download and search for other templates yourself, either go to templates.office.com, or to this link to get all accessible office templates.

If you are in an office program such as word, excel, or power point, you can search for any template you are interested in from the new tab. You can search for accessible templates, if you want to be sure your template is accessible. You can also browse various categories of templates.

Time for Pretzels and Beer

I’m still waitin’ for someone to buy me a drink after work … anyone? Well, I hope this helps you work smarter, not harder, when you have to get a document done double time. See you later.

Qapla!L