A friend recently asked me if I knew a better way to create timesheets. She was using Word tables and doing the math on her own.
I promptly opened Excel and found the template she wanted from the Workbook Gallery. (You can find it, and others like it, here.)
The beauty of this template, like all Microsoft Office templates, is that it takes other people’s best practices and combines them into a document you can use for free – all the math and formatting is done for you. Microsoft generously supplies hundreds of templates with every copy of Office, covering many common types of documents like invoices, calendars, memos, faxes (if you still use faxes), flyers and other stuff.
The real beauty of templates? They let you can spend less time creating the document you need and more time doing the work you need the document for.
How you can use this tip
You might not like the precise formatting used in a given template, so you can (if you like) change it to your liking, then save it as a template of your own. (In the Save As dialog, go to the Format drop list and choose the Template option.)
Don’t have Microsoft Office? You can still use Office templates, since other software (like OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony and Apple’s iWork) can handle Microsoft Office document formats.
Not only that – you can download templates from various places on the web (including, of course, Microsoft’s template collection) for free. (Note: some sites may charge a fee.) Just open a template and start working on it. If you know what you want to do, you’ll quickly figure out the template.