Document templates help to ease the work and get a standardization on processes within an organization.
Using these templates, a carbon copy of any item can be obtained easily without wasting time.
SharePoint, being the best collaborative environment, has several options to store and reuse document templates, no matter if it is a program schedule template or an accounts template etc.
This article discusses the most common five ways to store and reuse document templates in SharePoint.
Where can you store the document templates:
- Site
- Document Library
- Content Type
- Document Set
- Document Library Templates Menu
SITE:
You cannot embed a document directly in a site or site collection. It should be inside a document library that is already in a site.
You can create all sites that contain a document library and a template file in it. This is very much useful if different projects have certain documents which are the same.
This template method does not work on Communication sites or Team sites connected to an Office 365 group. Only the site owner will be able to save the templates.
DOCUMENT LIBRARY:
To replicate document templates, it should be part of a document library. Instead of replicating a site, you can save a document library with documents inside it as a template.
The template library will then become available from the Site Contents > Your apps when you create a new app. If you don’t want to list all the template document libraries with an app/web list then this is not the suitable option for you.
You can also save regular lists as templates like libraries by using this simple technique.
CONTENT TYPE:
A key feature of content type is its ability to associate a document to it.
If you have a content type called “Expenses”, you can associate a company document template for all expenses to this particular content type.
When you click on the New button within a document library, you will get a fillable Word Document, instead of the default blank one.
The template can be any file type, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.
DOCUMENT SET:
Document Set is a special Content type. Like the site template, every time you create a new document set, document templates will be automatically a part of it.
Unlike site templates, the main difference is that you can configure templates within document sets to carry a suffix of the document set name.
This might be a great way to differentiate between template files and other files within a document set.
For example, if you have a “Expense.xlsx” file as a document template within a document set, once a new document set is created, the file name will be [document set name] -Expense.xlsx.
DOCUMENT LIBRARY TEMPLATES MENU:
Yet another recently added feature to store and reuse document templates in SharePoint which has been added to the list of features relatively.
This is a quick way to add the document templates from the front-end of a document library.