Hi everyone,



I started a new job. They want me to take older Word documents and apply the Word Template they provided to these Word documents.

• How should I apply templates to Word documents?

• Can I just add in a template to a blank Word document and then copy and paste the content into it, making sure I get the features correct, such as headers and body text?

How do I go about creating a Word template?

• What is the usual information that goes into a Word Template? Is it, colors of text, header font sizes, body font sizes, ect?

Thanks for your help.

Big question! For answers, see:

• Templates in Microsoft Word
• What is the relationship between a Microsoft Word document and its template?

You can create a new document based on a template and copy from an old document, pasting the content into the newly created document.


See also: Basic concepts of Microsoft Word: An introduction by Shauna Kelly, MVP

You may to understand Style usage aa well. The Templates will include Style Sets. Hopefully their Templates are consistent with Styles or you may have to reconcile those.

More on Styles:

• Importance of Styles in Word
• Tips for Understanding Styles in Word by Shauna Kelly

There are different levels of 'applying templates'. A large number of decisions need to be made to determine whether each document requires any/all of the possible steps. The things I would consider while doing this task are:
1. Attach Template
2. Refresh styles from the template (update the style definitions to match the template style definitions). May include updating color palette and font theme settings.
3. Apply styles to content that had the non-preferred style applied. In this step you may also need to remove local formatting by pressing Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-Space.
4. Replace covers and initial pages with standardised template contents (cover, TOC, version control, acronyms list etc)
5. Add standardised heading structure if this has been defined for different document types.
6. Replace header/footers for all sections
7. Standardise page setups for all sections

As you can see from the steps listed above, attaching a template is not a minor undertaking. Many decisions will need to be made along the way. You should get a good look at the range of documents that you have to convert and sit down with your boss and decide on how far they want to go and how much flexibility you might have in making decisions on the fly. I can guarantee that the 'template' will not have provision for EVERY formatting decision you will encounter but if you follow the basic principles you can make big improvements in the state of the documents.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thanks everyone for your replies.

Quick question. Can't I just save a template as a word file and then copy and paste the text from the word document that is not the template into the template? This way I make sure all the headers and colors are correct.

You create a new document based on a template you do not save the template as a document. [This is jargon, but an important distinction.] This was my suggestion in my previous response. Try it.

The links, though, were not for show. The first explains what templates are and how to use them. Templates may contain numerous features, not only headers and footers. Yours may not contain those.
The second link clarifies what goes from a template and stays in a document. It also talks about what happens when you attach a different template to an existing document (it does not change existing header footer content).

I encourage you to read the linked articles, including those on styles. If you are going to be working with Word for your job, you need to more.
You could start here: Basic Concepts of Microsoft Word - from Shauna Kelly

Copy/Pasting content which includes section breaks from an existing document into a new 'template' document results in only the last section including the 'template' header and footer. The earlier sections will still have the previous header/footers that they had in the source document. This is because the page setup, header and footer information for each section is held within the section break that follows the content.

So simply copying content from the source document doesn't necessarily change the headers and footers for all the document UNLESS there are no section breaks in the copied content.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia