When you are going to make a template, it is important to think carefully about the following issues and to have a clear picture of your needs and requirements.
How to make a template in Office 365
A template is a digital version of the stamp. You only need to create this stamp once, after which you can use it an infinitely. By using templates in Office (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook) you won’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you have to format or fill in a document or presentation. In previous articles we have already explained the benefits of Word templates for example, but what does such a template actually entail?
Characteristics of corporate identity
The corporate identity is the most striking and perhaps the most important aspect of an Office template. The corporate identity of a document or presentation carries the identity of your organization and leaves a unique impression, also called image, with the recipient. That’s why, when we build a reliable and professional corporate image, corporate identity monitoring is of great importance. By stipulating and recording the corporate identity in templates, they are much easier to manage.
Examples of these features can be:
- Company logo
- Fonts
- Colors
- Layout
- Corporate signature
- Formatting charts and tables
- Images and other design aspects
Contents
There are two types of content for creating templates, namely the variable and the standardized content.
The variable content is, in most cases, unique information that is bound to a specific recipient. This variable content may contain the salutation, address and contact details of the recipient and/or a unique message or image addressed to the recipient. This content is generally not reusable and therefore cannot be stored in a template. It is, however, possible to use smart tools like iWRITER to automatically provide documents with the most recent data from, for example, Microsoft Office 365 Contacts or Microsoft SharePoint.
The standardized content can contain all information that is used repeatedly in documents or presentations. This can be, for example, an instruction or travel directions. When creating templates, however, you will need to consider the extent to which specialized information should be standardized. If more information is standardized, filling in a template is faster, but a greater standardization of information becomes equivalent to the information becoming irrelevant, resulting in having to create many different templates.
Once you have given attention to all these aspects, you can save the document as an Office template in order to benefit from the time and cost savings that it generates. To get more out of templates in Office 365, iWRITER offers a complete and organization-wide solution based on central corporate identity templates. With this smart and user-friendly tool you can create and manage Office templates which match and reflect the corporate identity of your organization.
