Customize the Templates Dialog and Default Workbook

Imagine you have a spreadsheet containing days of the year and formulas summarizing various data for the days. You have formatted this spreadsheet beautifully with your company colors, logo, and required formulas, and you need to use it on a daily basis. Instead of reinventing the wheel (or copying and deleting what you don't need) each day, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble by creating a template.

Excel's worksheet and workbook templates provide you with a running start on your next project, enabling you to skip the initial setup, formatting, formula building, and so on. Saving a template worksheet simply means opening a new workbook, deleting all but one worksheet, and then creating the basic template you will be using. Once you're finished, select Office button → Save As... (pre-2007, File → Save As...) and choose Excel Template (Template on Mac OS X) from the dialog's Save As Type (Format on Mac OS X) drop-down list. If your template is to be a workbook template-i.e., it will contain more than one worksheet-again add a new workbook, make all the necessary changes, select Office button → Save As..., and save as an Excel template.

Template in hand, you can create a clone at any time by either selecting the Office button → New(pre-2007, File → New...; File → Project Gallery on the Mac) and selecting a workbook template, or by right-clicking the Worksheet tab and selecting Insert... from the context sensitive menu to insert a neww orksheet from a template. Wouldn't it be nice, though, to have those templates available to you right from Excel's standard Insert Template dialog, or to set your preferred workbook as the default? You can, by creating your own Template tab.