The K Desktop Environment

8.11. Creating Templates/Saving a document as a template

KWord commes with several pre-defined templates (both Wordprocessing and DTP templates), which are designed to get you started on your documents.

If, however, you often use the same format for a document over and over, you may want to create a template which exactly matches your needs.

You can create an unlimited number of templates in KWord, and you can organize them into categories for easy recall.

You create these templates by first generating the layout in KWord based on one of the pre-defined templates, and then you save the file. Instead of saving it as a traditional file, you save it as a template.

What follows, is a step by step process to save the current document as a template.

  1. When the document is like you want, Select Extra->Create Template From Document from the Menu bar.

    This brings up a dialog:

    This dialog helps you organize your templates into categories.

    As you can see, your templates will be saved into a subdirectory in your home directory. You first need to create a Folder (which represents a subdirectory) within the "templates" directory.

    To create this folder:

  2. Place the mouse cursor over the line directory name (in this example: /home/mmcbride/.kde/share/apps/kword/templates/) and click with the right mouse button.

    This will bring up a submenu.

  3. Select Add Folder.

    This will add another dialog to the screen.

  4. Type in a name for the folder. The name should be descriptive of the types of templates you will be placing within it.

    Click "Clear" to ???Not implemented yet???.

    Click "Cancel" to abort creating a new folder.

    Click "OK" to create this folder.

    The dialog box will now show your new folder.

    Note

    You do not need to create a new folder for each template. The folders you create can be used to organize your templates.

    You must, however, have at least one folder. You can not save any templates into the templates subdirectory.

  5. Select the newly created folder by clicking once on it with the left mouse button.

  6. Type the name of your new template in the blank entitled "Template Name".

  7. You now need to select a graphic to represent your template in the open document window.

    ???Not implemented yet???

Once you have saved your template, the next time you open a document, you will see your new category/new template in the open file dialog.

This is an example of a new category named "Newsletters", with a new template named "Monthly".