use or distribute Word templates over company network

[idtp - Wim Hooghwinkel]

Hi,

we have a set of templates for office use (Letter, Fax, Report) that are
stored on a network location. The company has offices in several locations
and different countrys. There are too many templates (languages, offices) to
manage using a shared workgroup template folder, although we still do that.
For people working remote and not connected to the network these templates
won't be available anyway. In the templates we use autotext and button bars
for formatting and inserting reusable items. Also because of the many
locations and remote users, our IT department doesn't want to distribute
locally stored start-up templates with macros etc.

So now we want to use our Intranet to give users access to the templates.
This can be done by using hyperlinks.

Now I have two questions:
- when a user creates a new document based on a template, the autotext en
button bar are not copied into the new document ( I'm not sure about styles).
When the connection to the template is broken (by disconnecting from the
network) the autotext and button bar is not available anymore. Is there a way
around this - to create a new document containing all the template contents?

- can you advise on how to make templates accessible over a company network?
Any real life examples will be appreciated.

Plesae contact me directly ([email protected]) with more specific solutions or
propositions...

thanks!

Kind regards,

Wim Hooghwinkel
Consultant User Documentation
www.idtp.eu

 

[Kaliope]

Hi Wim - what version of Office (I'm assuming Word) are you using?

If you have Word 2007, you can create custom building blocks and save them
as Quick Parts or to the building blocks organizer for your templates.
Building blocks are essentially just autotext entries but a bit more
sophisticated in that in you can include graphics, formatting,and so on but
you do need to save them specifically to the file you're sharing as a
template.

There are instructions here in the "Inserting text boxes, tables, and
building blocks" section of this Office Online article:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/HA102373631033.aspx

~ Kaliope