Logon - Do you have a company-wide Word template?

Last updated by Brady Stroud [SSW] 8 months ago.See history

A company-wide Word template brings many benefits e.g.:

  • Consistency - It's important to maintain consistency on documents internally and for clients
  • Automatic footers and headers - Showing the latest edit time and who the editor was, updating automatically on save
  • Branding - More and better branding and correct company colors

word template bad
Figure: Bad example - Creating an email/document does not have the company templates

word template good
Figure: Good example - Creating an email/document with the company templates

How to have a company-wide Word template:

  • Modify your Normal.dotm file to have the headings and format that you want for Word document
  • Create standard employee email footer files e.g. JamesZhou.htm or JamesZhou.txt
  • Put the files on a network location - this is the place that will have the master copies
  • Have a logon script which is set up through Group policy that will copy the file to the users' computer when they logon
ECHO Copy Office Templates To Workstation >> %LogonLogFile%
call %ScriptFolder%\SSWLogonScript\BatchScript\SafeCopyNewerFile.bat "\\fileserver\DataSSW\DataSSWEmployees\Templates\Normal.dot" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Templates\Normal.dot" %LogonLogFile%
call %ScriptFolder%\SSWLogonScript\BatchScript\SafeCopyNewerFile.bat "\\fileserver\DataSSW\DataSSWEmployees\Templates\Normal.dotm" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Templates\Normal.dotm" %LogonLogFile%
call %ScriptFolder%\SSWLogonScript\BatchScript\SafeCopyNewerFile.bat "\\fileserver\DataSSW\DataSSWEmployees\Templates\ProposalNormalTemplate.dotx" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Templates\ProposalNormalTemplate.dotx" %LogonLogFile%
call %ScriptFolder%\SSWLogonScript\BatchScript\SafeCopyNewerFile.bat "\\fileserver\DataSSW\DataSSWEmployees\Templates\NormalEmail.dot" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Templates\NormalEmail.dot" %LogonLogFile%
call %ScriptFolder%\SSWLogonScript\BatchScript\SafeCopyNewerFile.bat "\\fileserver\DataSSW\DataSSWEmployees\Templates\Microsoft_Normal.dotx" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Templates\Microsoft_Normal.dotx" %LogonLogFile%
call %ScriptFolder%\SSWLogonScript\BatchScript\SafeCopyNewerFile.bat "\\fileserver\DataSSW\DataSSWEmployees\Templates\Blank.potx" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Templates\Blank.potx" %LogonLogFile%
xcopy /Y "\\fileserver\DataSSW\DataSSWEmployees\Templates\NormalEmail.dotm" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Templates\" >> %LogonLogFile%
xcopy /Y "\\fileserver\DataSSW\DataSSWEmployees\Templates\NormalEmail.dotx" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\QuickStyles\" >> %LogonLogFile%
ECHO Templates Copied

Figure: Bad example - This is a snippet of an old login script

You can automatically have your SSW Word doc template on sign-in via a script. E.g. PowerShell login script.

Good example - New Login script on Github

Note #1: We don't want people using .RTF emails.

Note #2: If you use a Mac computer, a login script will not work. In order to use a Word template, you must open the template on Word locally, hit "Save as Template", and then upload that document to Teams.


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