Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Templates

This chapter may cover the most advanced features of Microsoft Word, but nothing you’ve read so far can touch the exasperating—yet exhilarating—complexity of templates, the system of special files that Word uses to store your keystrokes, AutoText entries, styles, and dozens of other preference settings. There are two kinds of templates—global and document. Because you can simultaneously load more than one template, sometimes they interact in complex ways, including switching your text to radically different formatting.

When using Word as a basic word processor, you can safely ignore templates. Millions of people use Word every day, in fact, unaware that lurking behind the scenes of every single document is one critical global template called Normal. Every setting they change, every keystroke they redefine, every style they apply—everything gets stored in this template file. Most people, in other words, never need step behind the curtain to view the knobs and levers controlling the template.

Learning about templates, however, can pay off in spades in certain situations. For example:

• If you collaborate with other people, you can send them a template you’ve created containing an officially sanctioned set of styles, so that all your documents will have a consistent look.

• Similarly, your boss or network administrator may give you a template file, filled with styles, so that your corporate correspondence will resemble everyone else’s.

• Or maybe you plan to use your laptop, and want ...