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Microsoft Excel 2016 Bootcamp - Zero to Hero Training

Creating a template

Daniel Walter Scott || VIDEO: 1 of 24

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All right, we're going to look at creating a template for this quotation, or an invoice, it doesn't really matter what it is.

You're probably sick of opening the last job, doing a 'Save As', and changing it out, and hopefullyremembering to change the file name, and not saving it over the last one. It's probably why you are here, because you've done that a few times, but that's the cave man way of doing it. A slightly less cave man way is to use 'Sheets', so, this is our 'Workbook', the whole document, and you're going to have sheets within here.

So what I can do is, I can double click 'Sheet1', and call this one, maybe 'Invoice-- I'm going to call it BYOL, Bring Your Own Laptop invoice with invoice number at the end here, '0099'. You can see it up there. 'Enter'. And what I can do is I can right click this one, say I need a new one, so the next quote that I need to do, I can right click it, go to 'Copy'. Just remember to click 'Create a copy'. Click 'OK'. And we get this extra option. So it's just got appended with the number '2' there. I can double click that, and just change this to '100'. I can keep doing that. It's kind of good, keeps all my quotations in one book. And that might be enough for you. You might go, "Job done, that works enough for me." And you just toggle between obviously the two here. We'll just go and change these.

So let's say that's not what you wanted to do. You want to make an actual physical template using the Excel stuff. All you need to do is-- I'm going to get rid of this option here. So I've only got one workbook.And I'm going to get rid of the name '0099' just to make it all tidy. Now all we need to do is, do 'Save As', as a template. At the moment it's just a regular Excel document. We can go to 'File', 'Save As', and here, under this drop down here that says 'Excel-- yours would be defaulting probably to 'Excel Workbook'. You want to go down to 'Excel Template'. Just know this, it's going to put that, not in a strange place but under your 'Documents', under 'Custom Office Templates'. Leave it to go in there. Give it a generic name.So mine's going to be 'BYOL Invoice'. Mine's actually a quote. So that's perfect. And I might actually call it a template just so I'm really aware of what it is. Cool, hit 'Save'. So now I have a template.

Now, using this template is quite important because you can overwrite your template accidentally. So the way to use it-- so we've created our template, what we want to do now is-- we're going to close this down, and if we open up 'Excel', what we can do, in the 'Welcome' screen here, we can go from 'Featured' to 'Personal'. And you'll see there's our quote just here. So if I open this up now, it's given me-- it's kind of generated a copy of it. You can see it's got a similar name, but it's got '1' appended to the end. And if I try and hit 'Save' now, either this, or at the top left here, or 'Control S', it's gone to 'Save As' by default. It won't really overwrite that template. Now I go to 'Browse', and I'm going to put it in my 'Documents'. I'm going to call this one 'Quote', and instead of 'Template', this one's going to be '0099'. And it's just a regular old Excel workbook. Click 'Save'.

So this is how to kind of style it. You have to go to that 'New Window', and go to 'Personal', and open it up. The trouble with doing it any other way is that, let's say I do something differently, I close this down, I pull up 'Excel', just be careful. If I go to my 'Recent's and open this thing here, my 'Template', I haven't generated a new document. Based on that template, I'm actually just opening that template. If I go and amend this now, and change it all, I've changed my template forever. So it's just about the way you've opened the file mainly. There are a couple of ways that make this work. If I close this down, and I find my template, it's under 'Documents', it's under 'Custom Office Templates', there he is there. And if I try and 'Open' him, watch this, if I go to this 'BYOL Quote Template', double click him, if I open him this way, you can see, it's appended with the '1' at the end, and this is perfect. So it's created a new page. I try and hit 'Save', it saves it as a new name. Back to where we were.

So it depends on how you want to open it. You can go to that option where you do it from this screen here where you go to 'Personal', or you can double click the file. You just can't go to 'Open'. Anything but 'Open', or using these 'Recent's, because that will update the template.

Okay, so that's it for creating templates. I feel like I've talked myself around a little bit in circles. In the next video, we're going to look at printing this on US letter or A4 documents, and making a PDF that can be emailed out as a quote, probably more helpful.

So let's go and do that in the very next video.