Creating Good MS Word Templates

Creating Good MS Word Templates

Propel Your MSP allows you to customize the MS Word .dotx template used when generating reports so you can brand them to your company colors and add your logo for example. Here are a few things to know when customizing the template in order to achieve a good result.

Download Propel Your MSP's .dotx Template

  1. Start by downloading Propel's Template. Go to Settings / General Preferences / Documents
  2. This template contains all the styles used by Propel Your MSP's Word reports, so starting from it is the best approach.

Create a MS Word Theme

This is not 100% necessary, but it could make future modifications easier.
  1. Create a MS Word Theme to your company's colors. Visit think link to learn how.
  2. Propel Your MSP primarily uses the "Accent 1" color, but graphs automatically make use of other Accent colors

Modify the Paragraph / Character Styles

  1. Do NOT modify the text itself, modify the style definitions. Visit this link to learn how.
  2. To make easier to further modify the documents generated on your computer, Propel Your MSP rigorously uses style definitions to style the documents it produces.
  3. Some custom styles are necessary. If your custom template does not have them, then document generation will fail:
    1. Paragraph: Small
    2. Character: Problem
  4. Tip: Be sure to configure the Before and After paragraph spacing settings. Propel Your MSP does not use extra blank lines to introduce spaces.

Modify the Table Styles

  1. To customize how the table looks, a table style is applied. Modify the table style itself of the table itself. Visit this link to learn how.
  2. 2 built-in table styles are used by Propel Your MSP's reports:
    1. Grid Table 4 - Accent 1
    2. Plain Table 1
  3. 1 custom table style is used:
    1. Grid Table 4 Compact (this should be the same as Grid Table 4 - Accent 1, but with smaller/no cell padding)
  4. Be sure to look at all the table style options

  5. Not all tables generated by Propel Your MSP use the same Table Style Options, but most use one of the following (so make sure they look good):
     or 

Optional Header / Footer

  1. You can create a custom header and/or footer that will be used on each page of the generated reports.
  2. If you use a different Header/Footer for the first page, it will be applied to the first page. If you do not define one, the default header/footer will be applied.
  3. Tip: use floating Text Boxes and images instead of tabs to aligned elements (this better adapts to Portrait vs Landscape orientations of the different section).
  4. You can use some Document Property Fields to output dynamic information. The common ones are:
    1. Title
    2. CreateDate
    3. Page
    4. NumPages
    5. Visit this link for more information

Cover Page

A second template exists for the report's Cover Page. It uses MS Word's "Document Properties" to ensure that the cover page template is generic and can adapt itself to all the Companies the cover page will be generated with. There are two types of "Documents Properties" that are used in the template: Built-in Properties and Custom Properties.

Built-in Properties

Propel Your MSP will populate the following built-in document properties:
  1. Company: Your MSP's name
  2. Subject: The report's subtitle
  3. Title: The report's main title


Custom Properties

Since MS Word does not have a built-in property for the customer name, Propel Your MSP will use the custom property "Client" to dynamic insert the customer's name in the template.

Additional Assistance

MS Word is powerful, but complex. If you run into any issues, please contact support@propelyourmsp.com.

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