How to Make a Template in Microsoft Word 2007

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tracy Prentiss of Montague, Mass., and I'm going to show you how to make a template in Microsoft Word 2007. Any document can be turned into a template. An advantage of making a document to a template, is when you go to base new documents on it, there are names you can't accidentally write over the original document. To turn a document into a template, open the document, make sure you have all of the text that you want to be standard text. This is going to be a letter head for example, I have the name and address of my group, as well as the phone number and the email. Any text that you don't want to appear in every document, you would want to delete before you save it. Once you're ready, you go to your Office Menu button and you'll choose Save As, Word Template. This will bring up your Save As dialog box. You need to give a name to the template, so that you'll be able to recognize what it is. If you want the template to appear when you go to File New in Word, you need to click on Templates under Favorite Links at the left hand side of dialog box. Once you've done that and named your Template, go ahead and click on Save, and your document is saved as a Word Template. You can now go to the Office Menu button and close that template. To use your template, go to your Office Menu button and choose New. In the new dialog box at th left, you want to choose My Templates to get to the ones that you have saved. This will bring up a list of all the templates you've created on your computer, including the one you've just saved, here is my letter. And when you click o.k., you'll get a brand new document based on that template. Notice in the Title Bar, it doesn't have a name, so when you go to save it, you'll get to rename it and your original document will be intact. That is how to save a template in Microsoft Word 2007."