Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Creating Templates

By now, you’ve undoubtedly used—and come to appreciate—Word’s time-saving templates. They range from the very simple, like the Personal Letter, to the complex, multipage Publishing Layout view templates. But whether plain or intricate, they all share a common purpose: to get you started on the document quickly, with a large part of the formatting already in place—so you can concentrate on the content instead of the layout. This section shows you how to make your own templates so you can add them to Word’s Project Gallery, where they’ll appear alongside Microsoft’s templates, ready and eager.

You can create your own templates either by starting from scratch with a blank page, or by modifying one of Word’s templates. After you make all your changes to the document, choose File → Save As and choose Word Template (.dotx) from the Format pop-up menu, give the template a name, and click Save. From now on when you open the Project Gallery you’ll find the new template listed in the My Templates section.

Modifying an Existing Template

Open a template as a starting point for your own template-modification endeavors. For example, you might decide to use the Event Poster as a basis for a standard poster design for your band—one you could easily modify with the date and venue for each new performance.

1. Open a template.

   Use the Project Gallery or the Elements Gallery to choose the Event Poster.

2. Click the Master Pages tab at the bottom of the window and make any changes you want to ...