Word Templates – 3 Essential Elements from Phil on Vimeo.
Business owners need designers to do what they can’t – create a high-quality and visually appealing representation of their corporate identity. But, like any other clients, they’re also looking for speed and efficiency alongside quality. In this post we look at some common errors users make when creating templates for Word.
Let’s talk about Steve. Steve’s not a real person, we just made him up to help illustrate our point. So, Steve’s a designer. He’s spent a few hours creating a professional letterhead with his client’s logo design placed neatly in the corner, but he’s using Adobe InDesign. His client wants the letterhead in an editable Microsoft Word document that he can re-use for all his business letters. In other words, they want a template for Word.
This is where Steve hits a snag. Like most designers, his world is Photoshop, InDesign, and other high-end graphics editors. He doesn’t know how to modify Styles, and he’s never even heard of a .dotx file. Unfortunately – for Steve anyway – this is a request designers get increasingly often. Businesses need documents to be usable and efficient as well as visually appealing.
The thing is, Office templates really aren’t that hard to set up. Yet, every day we receive Word documents that are missing the most fundamental elements of a proper template. So what’s going wrong?
Theme file
The Theme file is where you set the colour scheme, fonts, and graphic effects for your template. Check out our recent post to learn all you need to know about Themes!
Default Styles
We receive a lot of templates with Style lists a mile long. All this does is make formatting text much more complicated, which is the opposite of a template’s purpose. And that leads us to…
Redundant Styles
Another thing we see a lot of.
.dotx file extension
If you don’t save your file correctly, you miss out on all of Word’s functionality that helps control branding elements within every document you create based on your template. If your template isn’t saved as a .dotx file, it’s not a template. It’s that simple, really.
Need a template, but don’t have time to get into Word’s advanced features? We’re experts at creating templates for Word documents, and Microsoft Office templates in general.
On that note, in a future post we’ll explain what constitutes a real Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT) template!
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