Templates

What is a template

A template is a document model that you use to create other documents. For example, you can create a template for business reports that has your company’s logo and address on the first page. New documents created from this template will all have this information on the first page.

Templates can contain anything that regular documents can contain, such as text, graphics, a set of styles, and user-specific setup information such as measurement units, language, the default printer, and toolbar and menu customization.

All documents in LibreOffice are based on templates. In fact when you start a new Writer document, then the document is based on the default template for text documents. Templates in Writer have the ott file extension.

Why use templates

A lot of documents we create have similar information inside. Especially in a business environment we use common documents like reports, letters, application forms etc. Combining styles with templates we can create blueprints for all theses documents and this way:

• increase productivity
• keep consistency between our documents

What is the difference of having just a normal odt document as a template?

When using a template file Writer automatically creates a new document from the template and does not open the template file directly. In this way you avoid accidentally editing your template.