Document templates

My principal activity is the conceptual design and the programming of simple and komplex Word document templates. The project expenses for the development of a company-specific template set are justified by the following benefits:

• Corporate Identity: all documents reflect the company layout and and produce a positive effect in the eyes of your clients.

• Increase of user productivity: Specific dialogs are used in document creation - Quick access to complex Word functions - Access to data outside of Word - No waste of time by "tinkering" users, creating macros and templates with limited knowledge.

• Cost-savings: Lowering of cost for stationery, if letterhead elements are produced by software; Lowering of administration costs, if templates are created and support in a centralized way.

I can carry out the whole project for your company (specification, coordination with marketing or PR agency, conceptual design and development of the template set and/or the AddIns, support during rollout, creation of an online-help, user training, maintenance).

If desired, I can limit my services to support your administrators and developers in the design and development of templates or in debugging special cases, enabling you to profit from my extensive project experience.

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Background information about document templates

Templates for correspondence and internal documents

The following aspects are important for templates of this type:

• Document creation with dialogs: the user executes a dialog during or after the creation of the new document based on a template. This dialog allows the selection of a user profile with data for the sender's line, the input or the selection of address data, and the choice between layout options.

• User profile for the sender: the user can select a different profile with only a few clicks, so that other sender information is used in the document. This concept allows the change of roles and is important for secretarial work.

• Use of address data: depending on the ressources of your company, connection with address databases, Outlook or CRM systems is possible.

• Different languages: templates can be designed in such a way that one layout is used for different languages. The user selects the document language during the creation of the document. Logos, company data, and all labels in the document are changed accordingly (block with sender data, fixed text in headers and footers, spelling language of styles).

• Using different logos and company data: in companies with a certain number of subsidiaries or offices the user can select the firm during document creation, and the new document is created in this specific layout, or the firm data are entered into the document.

• Entering logos in the document for PDF creation: a favorite request is currently the transmission of documents via e-mail "as printed". Logos or stationery elements must be integrated into the document before the PDF-creation, but must be suppressed or deleted before printing (depending on the type of stationery used).

Templates for correspondence and internal documents

Working with large and structured documents can overstrain naive users: Sections with different page layouts or changing headers and footers, automatic numbering settings, table of contents, references, ignorance of paragraph styles. Often these documents are attached to e-mails and travel with Track Change activated, which creates additional complexity.

In my projects I have created are large number of templates for offers, contracts, opinions, memo, manuals and other types of large documents.

The following aspects are important with respect to these types of documents:

• Styles: Large documents can only be formatted using styles. It is reasonable to establish a central style management for headings and other styles to allow consistent formatting in documents based on different document templates. Shortcuts and context menus can add additional comfort for the user.

• Automatic numbering: Even in the last version the automatic numbering in Word has some deficits. The use is only apparently easy. Under the hood the internal numbering had (in the former versions) a tendency to create document corruption - especially in documents which were frequently exchanged and edited by different users. On the other side, numberings created by VBA macros and attached to styles, show a much greater stability. Users do not have to go to the generic Word numbering dialog and define the format in difficult steps, but can just select one of the company formats (and execute a VBA macro). This leads to more security and increases productivity.

• Additional formatting macros: In certain circumstances template-based additional macros can support the user in repetetive formatting jobs or in difficult tasks.