Best Practices

Know when to make a template

Templates are most effective when used to support projects that you work on regularly. Consider the kinds of projects you pitch most often. For example, you may often promote UX design projects and mobile app development projects. In this case, make two templates, one for each project type. Then you can define the variables for each, and even share sections that are the same in both templates.

Keep it simple.

Templates work best when they only cover your documents' bare requirements. Templates are only meant to act as general framework to save you time by helping you automatically apply repeated elements in your documents. After building your document using a template, have your team import specialized sections to suit your specific deal, size, or feature set. Think of templates as the pizza dough, and the sections and variables as the toppings.Set preview settings from the template.

Sometimes you may want to modify your client preview settings at the template level. The settings you apply here will override your account settings and will apply these preview settings to all documents generated from this template.

To set your client preview settings, open the Template Settings panel by clicking Edit Template Settings from the right-hand menu:

Save time by editing Preview Settings from the template.

Once you’ve expanded the Template Settings panel, update your preview settings by clicking Client Preview:

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I download my Template as a PDF?

At this time you can't download your template as a PDF. You can, however, download your document as a PDF file.

Once you generate your document, open its Document Snapshot page by clicking it in the Pipeline and then click Download PDF:

Why aren’t my variables populating in my template?

Templates act as a framework for you to generate client-specific documents. While in your template, your variables just act as placeholders and specify where your client-specific meta-information will populate in your document. Your variables will auto-populate in your document once you specify your client information in its Document Settings.

For more information, Check out our document settings article or our variables page.

Can I save my template to the content library?

Definitely!  When you create a new section in a template, this first version is your default/master version. When editing that version in your template, any changes that are made will affect the default template. But don’t worry, should you want to revert it to the original version, you can access it (or any other previous version) from the document’s revision history. 

If you edit this section in the Content Library, this creates a new version, (separate from the one in your document or template) and becomes the new default.

At any time you can set the default to another version, by clicking Make Default on a version in your Revision History. This one will be used when importing and it will be edited in the content library.

Can I change the background colour of my pages in my template?

Yes! To change the background colour of a page, you can use our shape tool. Drop a shape onto the page, and then adjust the shape to fit the size of said page and adjust the colour using the selector:

I’ve generated my document and I love the look of it, can I make this my template?

Yes you can! To save a document as a template, open the document in the Editor, click the arrow next to the save button and then click As template. Your new template will then be available for reuse in your Saved Templates section.

Remember: Templates are not documents. Templates act as a general layout and are not specific to a particular audience.