Home » Education & Career » Teaching Computer Skills » Microsoft Word Beginner Lessons - Lesson 4: Templates

Microsoft Word Beginner Lessons - Lesson 4: Templates

© Cheryl Lewis

Microsoft Word offers a whole range of possibilities with the different templates that they offer. I use Windows 98 and I counted 40 different templates available to me. Everything from a Blank Page to a Thesis to a Web Page. I have described templates to my children as patterns. Like in sewing, a pattern gives you the overall design of an item but you customize it with your sizes, colors and material designs. The template is pretty much the same thing.

When my children like to "play" school or office or restaurant or anything else they can come up with. They love to have real "office papers", "real school work", "real menus", etc. etc. They used to draw them with crayons or markers until my daughter discovered she could make them on the computer. Once she started doing this, she then discovered the different templates. I don't think she has used them all - yet - just give her time and she will. This is where the idea for my next lesson in the series Microsoft Word Beginner Lessons comes from.

You can show your child the different templates and give them ideas of things that they can do with them. This is a multibenefit lesson in my opinion. You will be teaching them something new on the computer, they will gain valuable practice while learning a new skill, and it will compliment their other play times since they can use this skill to make things for pretend time.

In order to find the different templates available to you after you start up Microsoft Word you will go to File on the Menu bar. Once the pop-up menu appears you will go to the word New with an icon that looks like a little piece of paper next to it and click this. You will then get a pop up page that has 8 different tabs on it, starting with General and ending with Web Pages. You will see below that some different options for templates in the General category and on the right you will see a Preview box.

Under the Preview box you will see that you can "Create a New" document or template. This lesson deals with creating a new document and not a new template. That is a lesson I feel is for more advanced MW users. When you click on the different choices available for templates you will see a preview or sample of what the document may look like in the Preview box. I recommend that you click on several different templates to give your child an idea of what your talking about with the Preview box.