265 Keep your templates current

- [Instructor] When you are creating a series of documents that are all essentially the same just with different content, the best practice is to create a template and then base all of your documents on that template, that way they all have the same master pages, style sheets, artwork, swatches, and in fact I have an entire title here that's all about using templates with Adobe InDesign. But in this tip I want to focus on one glitch that often occurs with me and with many other designers when you're using templates, and that is the templates get out of date.

I'm gonna show you what I mean and I'm gonna show you a fast way to fix that. Here is the slide template that I created for my training company a few years ago. It has the logo centered, it has this tint background, it's using Myriad Pro as the font, it has my Twitter address preceded by twt. On the next page I have a little cheat sheet that reminds myself of what my styles look like. Everything is Myriad Pro, the bullet is this red circle. Of course everything is using paragraph styles and master pages.

Now here is an example of one of my more recent slideshows that I've done in the real world. The logo is on the left, the tinted background is gone, the TWT is gone in frnot of @amarie because I figure these days everybody knows what a Twitter address looks like. The font is also different, it's using Adobe Clean instead of Myriad Pro, and my bullets are different as well, they have this little red triangle. I have other presentations that are kind of like an amalgam of both of those.

Here is one that I did a while ago that doesn't have the tinted background but it still has the TWT and so on. What I'd like to do is simply update my template, and that's what I suggest that you do as well to keep your templates relevant to your workflow. Instead of taking the most recent issue, whatever it is that you're working on, and then doing a Save As and then having to spend time getting rid of all the pages and elements and links and swatches that you don't need, just update the template, and a fast way to do that is to use the book panel.

The book panel will let you sync your styles, your master pages, and other elements from a good doc to one that needs updating. And all we're going to do is take a good example document which is this one called ID and EPUB3 slides current, and we're going to update the definitions used by those master pages and style sheets in our template. That way we'll have an up-to-date template that we can use from then on. Key here is that I have not changed any of the style names or master page names.

So you'll see here in Paragraph Styles, this is called Slide head, this is called Headline, and here in my slideshow, this is called Headline, and so on, same thing with the master pages. A Master and B Master, and A Master and B Master. All I need to do is find a good example of the source for the new updated attributes and my template and add them both to a book. So I go to File, New, Book, and I'll save it here on the desktop.

I'll call it template update.book and then I add these two documents here. So I'll go to Desktop, and here is my current document and I'll add my template. You want to make sure that the style source, the one that has this icon, notice I can just click here, is next to the most current version of your document, the one that you want to pull the new attributes from. And the template is the one that's going to get synced to this one.

Then the next step is to go to the Book Panel menu and choose Synchronize Options, and choose here what it is that you want to update. I like to be very careful here and only update the things I'm positive about, so I usually start out by de-selecting everything and then going through here and selecting the things that I do want to sync. I do want to sync the master pages, and I do want to sync the character styles and paragraph styles and swatches.

Okay, that's good. I can just click Synchronize here, and it's done, and now let's check out my Seneca slide template. And there it is updated, it has the triangle bullet, at the bottom it just says @amarie, because the master page has been updated, and the styles themselves, let's move this out of the way, are using Adobe Clean. Now my template is up to date, and when I create a new slideshow I can again confidently rely on my template and create a new untitled document from that template, and I'm good to go.