You have choices when you want to enhance the appearance of your document quickly. You can start creating a document by using a template, or you can apply themes and, if you're in Word, you can apply styles.
Template
Templates are files that help you design interesting, compelling, and professional-looking documents. They contain content and design elements that you can use as a starting point when creating a document. All the formatting is complete; you add what you want to them. Examples are resumes, invitations, and newsletters.
Theme
To give your document a designer-quality look — a look with coordinating theme colors and theme fonts — you'll want to apply a theme. You can use and share themes among the Office for Mac applications that support themes, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. For example, you can create or customize a theme in PowerPoint, and then apply it to a Word document or Excel sheet. That way, all of your related business documents have a similar look and feel.
Word styles
Themes provide a quick way to change the overall color and fonts. If you want to change text formatting quickly, Word styles are the most effective tools. After you apply a style to different sections of text in your document, you can change the formatting of this text simply by changing the style. Word includes many types of styles, some of which can be used to create reference tables in Word. For example, the Heading style, which is used to create a Table of Contents.
See also
Free Word Templates For Mac
- The templates Microsoft offers are the best you can get for no charge.
- The templates designed for PC Office are not all going to work on the Mac.
- You’re not on your own! If you download a template and it doesn’t quite work, we’re here to help!
- Use the latest browser.
- Make sure you have the most up-to-date, free Stuffit Expander installed; the older versions won't do the job.
First, Catch Your Rabbit
Download it
Opening the CAB
- If your browser is correctly set up, it will leave the file in your Downloads folder with a subfolder above it containing the unpacked content.
- If you can’t find it, start Stuffit and drag the .cab onto it.
- Stuffit will either issue an error message, or it will leave a folder containing the template in the same folder as the .cab file. If you get an 'Error 17540' from Stuffit, that means 'Can't understand the format' and the extracted template file will not be useable.
- Download File Juicer, install it, and run it.
- It will open a window onto which you drag the .cab file.
- File Juicer will then show you the folder structure inside the .cab.
- In one of the folders inside (the name varies a little) you will find a name like '123456.dot.doc'
- Change the extension simply to .dot, or Word is going to get a little confused.
- Manually drag the .dot file to one of your Templates folders.
- Send an angry email to Stuffit telling them they stuffed it..
- Send 10 Euros to the nice man at File Juicer.
- Your template is now available for use in Mac Office.
What’s Inside?
- Chances are the largest file is the one you want. If you find a .inf file in there, you can safely ignore that one: it contains instructions for the Windows Installer to install the file. An .msi is more of a problem: that’s a Windows installer file and indicates that the solution may not be complete without Windows .dlls. Carry on anyway: there’s only one way to find out!
- If you do not recognise what you got, assume that the file is a template for the application you chose. For example, if you are sent a .wiz file, and you chose a Word solution, chances are the .wiz is actually a Word template .dot (it’s a “Wizard”; the .wiz extension is not used on the Mac; it tells Word it should create a new document from the file then look for and run a startup macro.)
- Change the extension to the one appropriate to the template file type for the application you want to use. For example, in Word’s case, change the extension to “.dot”.
- Now, use your Microsoft Office application to open the file you have. DoNOT double-click it. Use File>Open… from within the application.
- If you double-click the file, strange results are quite likely. The file has arrived with the PC file-type and creator code embedded. If you double-click, your Mac OS will attempt to hand the file to the correct application. You may get lucky. If you do not, both you and the computer are going to get very confused.
- Don’t assume everything is lost if that happens: Quit whatever started, re-start Word or whichever application you thought it should be starting, and go back and use Open from the File Menu in that application (e.g. Word).
Save As to Finish
- Go to the File Menu and choose Save As.
- Replace the numeric file name with something you recognise.
- Leave the extension the way your application has set it, and do not change the Format setting.
- Check the Append File Extension checkbox if it wasn’t checked already, and ignore any “Compatibility Warnings” that you may get.
- Word will allow you to save the file in only one place: which is just as well, because if you save it anywhere else, you won’t be able to use it.
- Click OK, Allow the save to complete, and close the window (on the computer, silly!).
Did it Work?
- Now: Try File>Project Gallery>…
- All going well, the file you just installed will appear in your My Templates folder.
- Create a new document from it, and you should get all of the advertised text and functionality.
- You may see a “This File Contains Macros” warning. If you do, that’s good. That’s one of the main reasons for using templates: they are the place Office stores macros. Say OK and the macros should work to give you the functionality you wanted.
- The majority of the templates offered for download don’t have any macros in them, and you won’t get any problems at all.
- You’re done. Go do your work. The rest of this article is for the unfortunate few!
What if it Didn’t Work?
Microsoft Office Word Templates For Mac Free
- If you get an “Error in Hidden Module” notice, generally, you’re pooched! Sorry about that! Microsoft applies a digital signature to their code so that it will run without warnings on the PC. Because Mac Office does not support digital code signing, the code is locked: we cannot see or edit it on the Mac.
- If you have Virtual PC and Word 2003 installed, or you have a MacIntel with Windows and Word installed, you can open the file there and try to remove the digital signature. (If you don’t have these, ask us on the newsgroup: we may find the time to do this for you…)
- If you can get rid of the digital signature, bring the file back to the Mac and cause it to blow up again. This time, you will get an error and the VBA editor will open, with the first error the compiler found highlighted in yellow.
- Come to us on the Microsoft's Answers site with a very specific question (OS version, version numbers of Word, name of template, text of error message, sample of the code, which statement was highlighted) and we may be able to tell you how to work around it.
- If your question doesn’t contain enough detail, we can’t answer it (obviously). But others may try to, which may waste a lot of your time chasing down blind alleys.
- Often you can patch incompatible statements out of the code and the macro will run unchanged.
- You can always find a way to code around the problem if you are really determined. We can give you an idea of how long it might take. Whether you consider that expenditure of your time worth the result is a question you can then answer.