How to Use Excel Templates

Building a spreadsheet from scratch every time you need to track a budget, plan a project, or create an invoice is a massive time sink. Excel templates offer a smarter way to work, giving you a pre-built foundation complete with formatting, formulas, and structure. This guide will walk you through how to find, use, customize, and even create your own Excel templates to save hours of manual effort.

What Exactly Are Excel Templates?

An Excel template is a pre-designed spreadsheet file that serves as a starting point for a new workbook. Think of it like a blueprint. Instead of laying every brick yourself, you start with a fully-framed house and just need to add your personal touches — or in this case, your data. When you open a template, Excel creates a new, untitled workbook based on that template's design, leaving the original template file unchanged and ready for reuse.

The Benefits of Using Templates

Relying on templates isn't lazy, it's efficient. Here’s why they are so valuable:

• Saves Time: The most obvious benefit. You skip the tedious setup of creating columns, writing formulas, and applying formatting. Whether it's a project timeline or a weekly sales report, a template lets you jump straight to data entry.
• Ensures Consistency: For businesses, this is huge. Using a standard template for reports, invoices, or timesheets ensures that every document shares the same branding, layout, and calculations. This consistency looks professional and makes data easier to compare.
• Reduces Errors: Manual data entry and formula writing are prone to human error. Templates come with pre-tested formulas and logical structures, minimizing the risk that you’ll accidentally add instead of subtract or point a SUM function to the wrong range.
• Makes Excel More Accessible: You don't need to be an Excel expert to use a well-designed template. They provide a structured framework that guides you, making powerful spreadsheet functionality accessible even to beginners.

Finding and Using Excel’s Built-in Templates

Excel comes packed with hundreds of free templates for everything from personal budgets to business balance sheets. Finding and using them is incredibly simple.

Here’s how you can access them:

1. Open the Excel application.
2. Click on File > New. You’ll be taken to a home screen with a large search bar at the top and several suggested categories below it.
3. You can either search directly or browse the categories:
4. Once you find a template that looks promising, click on its thumbnail. A preview window will pop up with a brief description of the template.
5. If it's what you need, click the Create button. Excel will download the template and open it as a brand new, unsaved workbook, ready for you to start entering your data.

The original template file remains untouched, so you can create as many new workbooks from it as you need.

How to Customize an Excel Template

Rarely does a stock template fit your needs perfectly. The real power comes from being able to tweak it to match your specific workflow or brand identity. Fortunately, templates are fully editable.

Common Customizations to Make:

• Change Branding and Colors: A good first step for business documents is to add your company logo. Just go to the Insert tab, click Pictures, and select your logo file. You can also change the entire color scheme by going to the Page Layout tab and choosing a new option from the Themes or Colors dropdowns.
• Adjust Columns and Rows: Need an extra column for "Notes" or want to remove a row for a metric you don't track? Simply right-click the column letter or row number and choose Insert or Delete.
• Modify Formulas: Take a look at the formulas built into the template. Click on a cell with a calculated value, and the formula will appear in the formula bar above the grid. You might need to adjust a tax rate in an invoice template or change a budget formula to better suit your needs. Just be careful when editing formulas to not break the template's functionality.
• Define the Print Area: For templates meant to be printed, like invoices or reports, make sure the print area is set correctly. Highlight the cells you want to print, go to the Page Layout tab, click Print Area, and select Set Print Area. This ensures you only print the dashboard, not the underlying data tables off to the side.

Creating and Saving Your Own Custom Template

Once you’ve perfected a spreadsheet for a repeatable task — whether it’s a weekly social media analytics report or a monthly content calendar — you can save it as your own custom template. This is where you get the biggest productivity boost.

Follow these steps:

1. Build Your Spreadsheet: Start with a blank workbook or a customized version of an existing template. Set up all your headers, tables, charts, formulas, branding, and formatting exactly how you want them.
2. Clear Out Placeholder Data: This is a crucial step. Delete any sample data from the cells where new data will be entered each time. You want the template to be a clean slate, so leave all the input cells empty but keep your headers and formulas intact.
3. Save as a Template:
4. When you select the *.xltx format, Excel will automatically change the save location to a default "Custom Office Templates" folder. It's best to save it here, as this makes your templates easy to find later.
5. Give your template a descriptive name, like "Monthly Sales Report Template," and click Save.

That's it! Your custom template is now saved and ready for reuse.

How to Use Your Saved Templates

Finding the templates you've created is just as easy as finding the built-in ones.

1. Open Excel and go to File > New.
2. Right below the search bar, you'll see a few tabs, including Office (or Featured) and Personal (or Custom).
3. Click on Personal. All of the custom templates you've saved in the default folder will appear here.
4. Click your template to create a new workbook from it.

Practical Tips for Better Templates

Building good templates goes a bit beyond just formatting. Here are a few tips to make them even more powerful and user-friendly.

• Use Data Validation: For cells that require specific inputs (like "Status," "Department," or "Product Category"), create a dropdown list using Data Validation. This prevents typos and keeps your data clean and standardized. Just select a cell, go to Data > Data Validation, and choose List under "Allow."
• Protect Your Work: To prevent yourself or a colleague from accidentally deleting a critical formula, you can protect certain cells. First, unlock the cells you want people to edit, then protect the rest of the sheet. Go to the Review tab and click Protect Sheet.
• Create a Shared Library for Your Team: Save your company's P&L statement, budget forecast, and project status report templates in a shared cloud folder (like OneDrive or Google Drive). This ensures everyone on the team is using the most up-to-date and consistent versions.
• Add Instructional Notes: If other people will be using your template, use Comments or create a simple "Instructions" text box to explain how to fill out the sheet, what the color-coding means, or which cells shouldn't be touched.

Final Thoughts

Mastering Excel templates is a foundational step towards working more efficiently. They automate your repetitive tasks, maintain consistency across your documents, and remove the need to start from a blank grid, ultimately freeing up your time for more strategic work.

While templates streamline how you organize information in spreadsheets, there’s an even easier way to handle your business data. At Graphed, we help you connect all your data sources — from Google Analytics and Shopify to your CRM — so you can instantly create live dashboards and reports using simple language. It eliminates the hours spent exporting CSVs and wrestling with pivot tables, giving you a real-time view of your performance in seconds.