Mediaboss Marketing

July 5, 2012, 2:33 AM PDT

Takeaway: Sometimes its tempting to take shortcuts, but fight the urge when creating a new Word template.

If youve worked hard to format a document just right, you might be tempted to use that document as a template, but dont. Your new template, and consequently, any new documents you base on that template, will start life with whatever garbage the original document acquired during its lifetime. All those little attributes and attempts at things that you tried, things you didnt complete, but didnt delete - all of it ends up in every new document.The best way to create a template is to start fresh, even though that might seem inefficient.

You might also consider creating a template by opening a new document the way you always do and then saving it as a template file - but dont do this either. Your new template and its offspring will be based on your current (and probably somewhat customized) Normal template. Any customization will show up in your new template and its offspring. To illustrate this seemingly innocuous behavior, do the following:

Save Normal.dotm (Normal.dot) and close it. Now, press [Ctrl]+n to open a new document and start typing - the text will be in the color you just choose for Normal.dotm. Well, of course it is, and thats great for your new documents, but probably not a new template.(Dont forgot to change Normal.dotms font color back to Automatic.) In addition, dont forget all the other customizations youve made that arent even visible in a new document!

Its usually best to start a new template from scratch, as follows:

In short, it only seems like there are several ways to create a new template. To be safe, follow these guidelines:

Excerpt from:
The right way to create a Word template