Templates

[Philip Roe]

I want a template with a sheet of A4 divided into rectangular sections. I
want to save it as "name-cards.dotm" or "place-settings.dotm", for instance,
and use it from time to time, putting what I want into each section,
printing the sheet out and cutting it up. I want the size of the sections to
be fixed. I try to make the template with the help of the "ruler" (in Word
2007) and once I have got over my irritation at finding it at the edge of
the desktop instead of adjacent to the paper I go to page layout and use
continuous breaks to draw the horizontal lines and columns to draw the
vertical ones. Later, when I come to use the template, putting text etc.
into the rectangles I find the vertical lines stay where they are, as I
want, but the horizontal ones move about. A continuous break is not so many
centimeters below the top of the page but so many lines and it moves if you
change the size of your typeface. It must be possible to make custom
templates because you can download them from the web or get them from Office
publisher but how do we make our own to our own specifications?

 

[Gordon]

I want a template with a sheet of A4 divided into rectangular sections. I
want to save it as "name-cards.dotm" or "place-settings.dotm", for
instance, and use it from time to time, putting what I want into each
section, printing the sheet out and cutting it up. I want the size of the
sections to be fixed. I try to make the template with the help of the
"ruler" (in Word 2007) and once I have got over my irritation at finding it
at the edge of the desktop instead of adjacent to the paper I go to page
layout and use continuous breaks to draw the horizontal lines and columns
to draw the vertical ones. Later, when I come to use the template, putting
text etc. into the rectangles I find the vertical lines stay where they
are, as I want, but the horizontal ones move about. A continuous break is
not so many centimeters below the top of the page but so many lines and it
moves if you change the size of your typeface. It must be possible to make
custom templates because you can download them from the web or get them
from Office publisher but how do we make our own to our own specifications?

Why are you drawing lines?
Just make a Table with the correct number of rows and columns and save that
as a template.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Insert a table, x columns by y rows as required. With the cursor in the
table, use Ctrl+Alt+u to get rid of the printable borders. (Note that if you
now cannot see the table now, check Table Gridlines- which are non-printable
cell borders.) Select Table Properties and set the table Row height to
Exactly and Column width to the sizes required.

Save the document as a template in the template folder.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

As Gordon suggests, a table is what you need, and it's entirely possible
that you'll find one ready-made in Mailings | Create | Labels. For example,
if your "name cards" are the size of business cards, you could use an A4
template for business cards. Or you can create your own label definition
based on one with similar dimensions. The advantage of starting with a label
over creating the table from scratch is that Word's built-in label
definitions have some magic properties wrt margins that somehow escape the
"One or more of your margins is set outside the printable error" warning
when you print.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Philip Roe]

Thank you to those who responded. Using tables evidently struck you as
obvious but it did not strike me that way. I occasionally use tables to show
data but I never thought of them as tools for formatting. And Ctrl + Alt +u
is not exactly guessable!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Well, you don't have to use Alt+Ctrl+U (in fact, that shortcut was
discovered by accident and isn't really documented anywhere); you can select
the entire table and choose None for borders.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org