Creating a Template spreadsheet in Excel

Microsoft Excel, being a widely used Office application, provides more features as they continuously update the software promising computer users a better interface, more powerful options and easier to use at the same time. A spreadsheet is being used mostly in the office and other work areas, but it can also be beneficial to house wives for tracking personal budget, for runners or people looking forward to losing weight for tracking their daily calorie intake and many others. Even huge establishments prefer using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets because it does a lot of things and it could actually be programmed for numerous functions. The tool itself is relatively cheaper than other applications that practically do the same things – most often, Microsoft Office tools even provide more functions and are better than its competing applications and tools that could be found in the market.

On top of all the various things that can be done with a spreadsheet in Excel, one can create a template spreadsheet . If you’re used to creating similar spreadsheets most often, it is best suited to work a template instead of formatting your spreadsheets every time you create one. Through your template spreadsheet , you can load and format your default settings on it – this includes the formulas, the cell formatting options and many others. This feature saves you a lot of time and you don’t have to go through the entire daunting process of creating a spread sheet all over again.

Creating a default template spreadsheet in excel is easy. You don’t need to have additional tools or other software applications to do so.

1. Open a new worksheet. Load all the default formatting options, labels / titles, formulas and other settings that you wanted to use for future use. Headers, footers, macros – simply said, anything that you would use in the future. You might also want to add more cells and more columns just in case you have decided to add more values to the current worksheet that you’re working on. Generally speaking, enter the information that you wanted every time you’re going to create a new worksheet. You might find the need to add more later on, but the important thing is the basic formatting options should be there in your template.
2. From the File Menu, choose Save As. Instead of saving it as a spreadsheet (.xlsx), choose Template from the Save as type box.
3. Choose the folder where you want the template spreadsheet to be saved. This option depends on your preferences or if you want to save it another drive, you may do so. As long as you know where to find the file just in case you’re going to work on your template worksheet. Upon doing this, you are also saving a normal template which means you have to manually load the template before using it.
4. On the other hand, if you want to use that specific template by default, save your saved template to the XLStart folder – you should be able to see it here: Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\XLStart.
5. Choose a name for your template.
6. Hit Save.

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