Small Business Productivity Tips: Microsoft Word Templates Save Time

Do you ever get tired of doing documents with the same layout time and again? Well, you could go to a previous one, copy the layout, delete the material relevant to the previous document and then fill it in for this particular need. Kind of boring and frustrating isn’t it?

Here’s a better way. Take that same document and clean it up once then turn it into a template that you can call up again and again. Although this video forgot to mention how to get the template, when you go to create a new document in Microsoft Word, it gives a group of Templates. Look for My Templates, which is where you will find the template you make.

This is the 5^th video in the Small Business Productivity Tips series. Today’s video covers the why and how of creating a template in Microsoft Word.

Similar to AutoCorrect

Note: See Small Business Productivity Tips on AutoCorrect for the post on AutoCorrect (http://www.askjra.com/ae044)

The following are the points where they are similar.

• Ensures proper spelling, addresses, and phone numbers
• Includes any blog URLs that you will use regularly
• Similar to checklists but without the need to re-enter information

Use for things you want to be sure to include every time

The template for this video provides an idea of some of the fields you might want in a template of your own. This one is specifically use with creating a video for the Small Business Productivity Tips series:

• Date
• Title
• Post content
• Tags
• Categories
• Image data for image optimization – This section is for optimizing your photos, graphics or other images you might want in your blog post for this video. For instance, this blog post will need a thumbnail for the home page and a larger image for the Dynamic Content Gallery. As these images will be ‘crawled’ by the search engine spiders, putting this information in the picture will be valuable for search engine optimization.
• Promoting – Again, this section is to remind you of the things to do with every blog post, like ping the search engines, tweet about it and post it to your Facebook wall.

Where to save your template

C:\your username directory\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates – If you have any problems with finding the AppData directory, you may have to search for your hidden files.

As a small business owner, manager or staff member, you are hard pressed because you lack the resources of larger companies to delegate. Your sales people too are challenged as they usually need to make more contacts than ever before. This particular Small Business Productivity Tips video on creating templates in Microsoft Word shows another powerful tool for becoming more effective while both saving a lot of time and improving accuracy.

If you would like a copy of a template like the one used in this video, join my community by signing up for my mailing list. (Http://www.askjra.com/optin) Get your template as well as a your copy of the ecourse, “9 Steps to Finding Prospects Who Want What You Provide”  now.

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle, Aberle Enterprises, AUZ2VQHDJ5SU

More by this author:

Small Business Tips – What Makes a Good Website?

Small Business Productivity Tips For Your Website – What Makes a Good One

First Person: Small Business and the Challenge of Delegating