MS Word templates … do you use them?

When I say ‘template’, I don’t mean a single-paged document with a few headings that you have to try and craft a report from.

I mean a multi-paged fully-branded document based on a company-wide style sheet.  And I mean a structured document with standard headers, footers, sections, headings, and lots of instructions to explain what’s expected of the author.

So, why bother with templates like that?

Because those sorts of templates make good business sense!  Frame invested in a well-defined brand and we realised that the brand required a significant investment in documentation support—our brand’s about clarity, you see.  Over time, we’ve built up an extensive library of templates that cover everything we need for internal, project and service documentation.

It’s been a considerable investment, and the templates are continually tweaked to ensure they meet the needs of Frame and our clients.

But the investment has paid dividends.  We recognised the potential benefits of having well-defined templates, and by achieving those benefits the templates have paid for themselves.

Here are three significant benefits we’ve realised by having well-defined templates:

Support for authors.  How much time does your staff spend thinking about things like font and font size, heading size and style, content for headers and footers, and content and layout of cover pages?  Well-conceived templates enable writers to concentrate on content rather than document format and layout.  The pay-off?  Valuable resources aren’t wasting valuable time.

Consistent content.  A template enables a single source of truth for a document type.  For Frame, this has made it easier to alter document structures according to changing needs, and enabled us to indicate mandatory and optional content.  The templates prompt writers for the content expected—like the difference between purpose, objective, background, context and scope, and what goes under each of the major topic headings.

Here, there are two big pay-offs: there’s the obvious help for authors and, most importantly, the benefits for the document’s audience.  Frame customers know that every document they receive—from the proposal through to project handover—has a consistent look, layout and structure which aids them in reviewing and understanding the content.

Brand integrity.  This shouldn’t need explanation, but here’s one by way of example: three similar reports, from three different people, with three different layouts and formats—different fonts and font sizes all over the place, inconsistent headings and structure, even different cover pages … and no page numbers to be seen.  Templates eliminate this scenario, and promote internal brand awareness as well.  And customers notice that sort of thing.  Ours certainly do, and that's earned us a reputation for delivering high-quality documentation.  And that's just as well, given the promise of our brand.

Considering the amount of time we all spend writing and editing and printing documentation, templates can make a huge difference to the quality of the end product.  Of course there needs to be a process, training, and a style guide is essential … but they’re stories for another time.