Using templates

Sometimes the hardest part of using Excel is staring at a blank screen and wondering, okay, how am I going to arrange my workbook? How will I create the columns and rows? What's supposed to be on here? How is it supposed to look? Well, fortunately Excel gives you a lot of templates that you can use. They're free, some of them are built- in with Excel, some of them you can download from Microsoft's website automatically. Don't worry. You don't have to go into your web browser and start installing anything. It just happens automatically. Let's take a look. Go up to the File tab, so we're in Backstage view, and then down over here choose New, and look at all these templates.

Now these are not just templates; these are categories of templates. Now before we go into them, let me just explain if you want to create a new blank workbook and just another blank page, you can choose Blank workbook and choose Create. It's just the same thing as pressing Ctrl+N for New. But that's not important right now. Let's take a look at some other. I am just going to click Invoices here and here are all of the invoices that we have available, and click any one and whichever you click, you can see there is a little thumbnail there on the right. So you can have just about anything that you like.

So I am going to choose this Work order and double-click it. Maybe you'll like a different template, and that's okay. You see it says Your Logo Here. Well, that's pretty good, and when you click it, you see it's just a graphic. So I'll press Delete. Let's insert our own logo. So graphics are items that you insert, so go to the Insert menu and choose Picture, and in the Chapter 5 folder of the Exercise Files we have our Two Trees Olive Oil company logo. Double-click it. It inserts. Well, it's kind of big, so let's shrink it.

Put your mouse pointer on one of the corner handle, so you get the two-headed mouse pointer arrow and shrink it. Because it's an inserted graphic, you don't have to hold the Shift key down to constrain the proportions. You could just do it by hand and I will put this over here. You could change anything you want. You could change the slogan. Maybe let's put company name and so forth. Of course, you could fill out the address and zip code and all that. Well, let's do a little bit of formatting. I will just select the column headers here and back in Home tab we'll go over here to Cell Styles.

Now I like this Accent3. It's kind of an olive-y color and I will select it. Now we have it looking a little bit more like what we would have for our company. Now once you have all of your data typed in here, you probably want to save it. So before you save it, let's take a look at something up here. On the title bar see it says Work order1 and it says Compatibility Mode. That Work order1 means that this is the first file we are basing on that Work order template. The same thing as when you're creating a new blank workbook and Excel calls it Book 1, Book 2, and so on.

So it's the same thing here with a template, Work order1, Work order2. That Compatibility Mode means that this template was created in an older version of Excel and you will find that a lot. Not all of the templates were created for the 2010 version, but don't worry because you can use all of them even if they are in Compatibility Mode. So now we're going to save it and you could press Ctrl+S to save, you can click the little Save button here, you can go to the File menu, and choose Save, whatever you like. Instead of calling this Work order1, let's call this work order for company xyz.

You see it's saving it as a regular old Excel workbook. Click Save and there it is. You see there is the new file name. Let's close it. You can press Ctrl+F4 to close or click this X here to close. Now, let's say decide that oh, I want to use that work order again, but, gee, I don't remember what it's called. I don't remember where it was or anything. Well, you don't have to worry about that. Let's go back to the File tab, so we're back in Backstage View. Go back to New, and you see over here where it says Recent templates. Click that and there is that Work order again.

Double-click it and it comes in. Notice it doesn't have the logo and formatting and all that because this is simply taking a brand-new fresh copy of the original template. So anytime you're stuck and you're not sure how you want your workbook to look, take a look at the templates. I'm sure you'll find something you like.