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A Publication Featuring The Information
Services Technology of Maine State Government
| Volume VII, Issue 4 | April 2004 |
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The workgroup templates—weren’t they a Seattle-based grunge band
from the early ’90s? Well, not exactly. But this oft-overlooked feature of
Microsoft Office holds some real potential for productivity gains in many work
units.
Workgroup templates, as the name suggests, are a form of template document. If
you’ve never worked with templates, this bears a little explanation.
A template document is a form document, meant to be opened, modified, and re-used again and again. The best analogy is a “While You Were Out” stationery pad. You scribble up a sheet, rip it off the pad, and have a near-endless supply for future use. Computer templates work the same way. After you open a template document in Word or Excel, add your own content, and save it, Office doesn’t overwrite the template document that you started with. Instead, the Save As dialog box prompts you to save your document with a new name in a new location. That way, the template you started with survives unchanged in its pristine state, ready to be called upon the next time you need it.
Let’s focus on Microsoft Word. To access the canned templates
that are installed by default, select File New from Word’s menu bar. Although
different versions of Word behave differently, you’ll eventually reach the
Templates dialog box that displays the standard template collection, i.e.,
tabbed folders named General, Legal Pleadings, Letters and Faxes, Memos, etc.
Click a tab to view the template files in that category; double-click an icon to
create a new document based on that template.
Savvy Wordsmiths know that you can: (a) add additional template files to any of
the standard tabbed folders, and (b) make your own, custom tabbed template
folders to hold new categories of templates you’ve created for your own work.
And once an employee goes to the trouble of hand-tooling a set of templates, the
odds are high that he or she will eventually think, “Huh! These are pretty good.
Dick, Jane and Sally might want to use these.” But guess what—they can’t.
Templates that reside on one PC (or in a user’s private folder on a network
drive) aren’t ordinarily visible by another PC. To share templates among a group
of co-workers, they must be stored as workgroup templates on your local area
network (LAN).
There are any number of reasons why this may be desirable. Uniformity, professionalism, and elimination of redundant effort come quickly to mind. Ease of revision is another: modifying the template once modifies it for everybody. Plus, persons creating documents from templates are far less likely to send out letters with incorrect names and dates as commonly occurs when saved files are recycled for sending to another recipient.
Ready to give workgroup templates a try? Here’s how to do it:
Enabling workgroup templates is a two-part process. The first step is creation of a centralized folder on your LAN to hold the shared templates, and for this you need the help of your network administrator. At the Department of Professional and Financial Regulation (PFR), our Information Systems Support Services created a folder on a network drive called, appropriately enough, Workgroup Templates. Users can create subfolders in the workgroup templates folder, and can populate those subfolders with custom template documents.
Illustration 1 below is a Windows Explorer screenshot of the PFR
Workgroup Templates folder. Within this folder are three subfolders reflecting
the work of the complaint office here at PFR’s Office of Licensing and
Registration (OLR). Each subfolder contains a set of templates, such as the
three flavors of preliminary license denial letter shown in the screenshot.
The important thing to remember is that each subfolder created inside the
workgroup templates folder will appear as a separate folder tab in your users’
Templates dialog box. So you want to give some thought as to what might be the
most logical and concise organization of template subfolders within your unit’s
workgroup templates folder.
Illustration 1. Typical Workgroup Templates folder on a
network drive
Your network administrator can also customize access privileges for workgroup templates if you wish. For example, you may want to establish separate workgroup template folders for different offices within your department. That way, employees would see only those templates that are relevant to their jobs. Through your administrator, you can prevent unauthorized or unintentional modification of the template files, control who can create new categories (i.e, subfolders) of workgroup templates, or control who can add new templates to the existing subfolders.
The second step in enabling workgroup templates is telling each user’s copy of Office where on the LAN the workgroup templates folder is located. This task is best accomplished by your administrator on a centralized basis for all machines. That’s it for setup.
From now on, when an authorized user selects File New from Word’s menu bar, the Templates dialog box displays a separate tab for each subfolder that was created inside the Workgroup Templates folder. You can see how this works in Illustration 2, which is a screenshot of the Templates dialog box on my PC. The template tabs named Complaint Office, Preliminary Denial Letters and Release Maker correspond to the like-named workgroup template subfolders shown in Illustration 1.
Illustration 2. Templates dialog box showing workgroup
template tabs
Note that there is no tab named Workgroup Templates. The workgroup template subfolders simply take their place alongside all the local templates resident on a user’s PC (or in that user’s private folder on a network drive).
Is the trouble of setting up workgroup templates, training
employees how to use them, and convincing employees that it’s worth using them
likely to result in productivity gains that justify the effort? The answer, of
course, will vary from unit to unit. Now, what was the name of that band I was
thinking of…
A Staff Attorney, at the Office of Licensing and Registration, Jeff lives in
Windsor and reports that this is the first winter that has really been too cold
for him. He may be reached by calling 207 624-8615 or e-mailing
jeffrey.m.frankel@maine.gov.
