Are there such templates around? Would like to have a mix of 2, 3 or 4 columns of text per page, with easy image inserts.

Take a look at Publisher rather than Word for this sort of thing.

Doubtless there are, but you can also create one quite easily - or even modify an existing document on the fly. It's quite common, for example, to have a title spanning the page width but have the content before & after formatted in two or more newspaper-style columns.

A template isn't really going to help much with anything more than the initial layout.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]