Don't you love things that save you time and energy? When you are in the office, rather than wasting time on creating documents from scratch, you can focus on your tasks and duties by using and reusing simple templates. From budgets to to-dos and custom templates, check out these 10 time-saving tools.
Most of the templates below target Microsoft Office and compatible office suites. The Google Docs users among you won't have to reinvent the wheel either. With several templates available for the office, you can select a template for your project timeline, an invoice, a meeting agenda, and even for your business plan.
1. Budgets
For those who are in charge of the budget, working with financials can be enough of a task on its own. To ease that burden just a little bit, try using an uncomplicated template made especially for it. That way, you can keep your attention on those numbers, instead of the delivery of them.
TidyForms has a good variety of budget templates for various types of projects. Income, expenses, salary, and travel costs are all easily editable with this yearly budget template for Microsoft Excel.
2. Invoices
For documents you create on a regular basis, like invoices, templates that you can use over and over just make sense. Instead of wasting time, using a template means you can just pop in the numbers, dates, and get that invoice out the door.
A basic invoice from Microsoft that you can use with Excel is a great way to keep the task simple. Enter your company information and invoice details and let the template calculate the prices for you.
3. Meeting Agendas
If you plan meetings often, then having a few meeting agendas at hand can really save you time. From casual team get-togethers to important executive meetings, show your professionalism as well as your consistency with a well organized template.
An agenda that never fails is a classy, formal template from Office Templates Online for Microsoft Word. With a clean, structured appearance and the necessary information, you cannot go wrong.
4. Meeting Minutes
While a template for your meeting agenda can help you manage time, clearly structured meeting minutes become terrific time-savers once you need to follow up. It shows the participates a uniformed process and also lets them know what to expect after each meeting.
What better application for capturing meeting minutes than a note-taking tool like Microsoft OneNote? With its built-in templates, you can choose from a casual to a formal look and feel with sections to match.
5. Newsletters
If you send newsletters to clients and customers regularly, then having a template or two is not only efficient, but will be more pleasant for the recipients. They will know what to expect with each communication and you will be able to provide them with the news and deals faster.
With a great variety, optional customizations, and a drag-and-drop editor, Campaign Monitor has high-quality newsletter templates to give your communications that professional look.
6. Presentations
For presenting products, projects, reports, and other work materials, templates for Microsoft PowerPoint can help you prepare for presentations with less effort. Creating slideshows from scratch can be a huge time sucker, so use a template that contains your logo, a consistent theme, and company colors and then just pop in your data.
As an example, when you want to display a project's progress regularly, this template from SlideHunter gets it done. With adjustable colors and a comprehensive timeline, this sleek Gantt chart template works well.
7. Status Reports
Similar to meeting agendas and minutes, status reports with a consistent look and feel are quite appropriate for business. For those who create monthly, weekly, or even daily status reports, templates can make that job task much easier.
Word 2016 has nice, built-in templates available for status reports. Depending on the type of look you want, one that includes summaries and overviews with a clean appearance is a solid choice.
8. Tables of Contents
Those who are tasked with creating documents in the office that use a table of contents usually prefer a consistent look. And, if you have ever crafted a table of contents without a template, then you know it can turn out to be quite an undertaking, depending on the length of your document.
Template.net has a good selection of table of contents templates for both Word and PDF documents. From simple to advanced, you are sure to find one that suits your needs.
9. To-Do Lists
Task lists that are shared with team members, coworkers, or supervisors should be simple to understand. With a template that makes tracking to-dos easier for those in the office, you can all spend more time on the tasks at hand, rather than the list that tracks them.
Microsoft OneNote offers three types of task list templates to suit your needs. From a simple list to one that is prioritized, you can choose just one or all three.
10. Custom Templates
Do you love to use templates, but prefer to create your own to save and reuse? Making your own PDF or Excel template, or one with Evernote, may take a bit of time upfront, but the time that you save in the long run might just make it worth it.
Note that most templates you can download for free can be adjusted to meet your needs. Sometimes, it's a matter of finding something that's almost perfect and customizing it until it works for you. Keep this in mind before you start creating a custom template from scratch.
Which Templates Save You Time at the Office?
Is there a template that you use daily at the office and find it to be not only a time-saver, but a life-saver? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!