Excel Templates

When you open Excel, click the File tab and this will enable the backstage view. Click New and this will display all of the templates you can choose from.

Browse through the different templates and find the template you are looking for. Click on the selected template and the different varieties of the template will be displayed. Select the type you need.

When opening the template version you will be presented with several different options once again. Again, the options are plentiful. You will see this over and over again with template options in MS Office. Make your final selection.

The Daily Chores template is the selection here. We can see what it looks like by clicking on it. In the right pane, you will see a thumbnail view of the template and the popularity rating.

If the selected template is what you are looking for, click the Download icon to begin using the template. You may not have fish or dogs or go to school. You can specify the tasks as you see fit. A slightly whimsical example is shown in the screenshot below.

All of the templates in Excel can be customized, of course. They save a great deal of time and there is a wide variety to choose from.

Word Templates

Working with templates in MS Word is similar to working with them in Excel. Open a new document and click the File tab and select New. The template options are presented.

Choose the template that you need. Word is quite useful in this respect when it comes to templates. If you are running your own business, there are a variety of different invoice formats to choose form. You can also use job description templates and forms or create flyers for promotional purposes.

After selecting Invoices, you will see the different categories, much like we saw in Excel. Select the category.

The “Simple Design” of a Sales invoice was selected and in the right panel, you see the preview. If you like what you see, click the Download icon. This will bring up the template and you are ready to start entering products and services, the cost and the total. You can modify the business name at the top as well as all other information.

These templates work the same in all aspects of MS Office. You can use them for PowerPoint too. It is simple and practical to use templates and the time saved is well worth the extra clicks.

But you don’t want to just have any file type inside of the the Create Document option. Instead you will want to have the type of documents you use most frequently. Depending upon where you access this feature, the document, and the icon for that document, will be displayed. For instance, if you right-click on the desktop that new document will appear on your desktop. If you use the Nautilus menu the icon for your new document will appear in the directory you accessed the menu entry. Let’s take a closer look.

Templates

The first thing you will need to do is create some templates. These templates can be actual templates (documents with formatting and styles) or just blank templates. The easiest way to create them is to open up the tool that will be used to work on the the individual file. Let’s use OpenOffice.

Open up OpenOffice and do the following:

• Create and save a blank text file as a template (.ott). Name it Text.
• Create and save a blank spreadsheet (.ots). Name it Spreadsheet.
• Create and save a blank presentation (.otp). Name it Presentation.

NOTE: When you create a presentation template you might want to create a template with all the trimmings instead of just a blank one.

Take note of where you saved those files as you save them. I am going to assume they are saved in ~/Documents. Now close out OpenOffice and open up a terminal window. What you need to do now is to move those templates into the ~/Template directory. you can do that with the following commands:

mv ~/Documents/*ott ~/Templates

mv ~/Documents/*ots ~/Templates

mv ~/Documents/*otp ~/Templates

Of course you can just save the templates to the ~/Templates directory from within OpenOffice.

Figure 1

Go back to the desktop and right-click anywhere to bring up the menu. You should now see three new entries in that menu (see Figure 1).

Figure 2

But what happens if you click one of those entries? When you do an icon will appear waiting for you to rename it (see Figure 2).

After you give this file a name you can double click the file to open it in the associated tool.

You can of course create template documents from just about any tool. Create image templates within GIMP and save them to the Templates file. There is a trick with files like images. If you create an image on the desktop and double-click it, the image will open in the default viewing tool – which is not GIMP. So you will want to right click the new icon and select Open With > The GIMP.

Final thoughts

If you’ve ever wondered why the Create Documents menu was empty, now you know why and how to populate it with file types. This is a very handy way to have quick access to create often-used document types.

I´am coding using a normal text editor but you can of course use tools like dreamweaver to alter the text and the layout of the templates that you download.