Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks
Templates are a great way to jumpstart a new file to achieve the look and feel you want. Up until now, if you use one of Google’s apps — Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms and Drawing — you’ve had hundreds of publicly shared templates from which to choose. Bad news — as of 2017, they’re all going away.
Note: For more background on this move, see the “Why is the Google Drive Template Gallery Going Away?” section below.
Why is This Bad News?
Whether you’ve used the public templates in the past or not, they provide a wealth of styles and formats that would take a lot of time for you to recreate. If you want to take advantage of them, your time to do so is growing short.
Your mission is clear:
If you want to save any of the Google Drive public templates that are going away, you need to copy them to your Drive account ASAP.
Start by visiting the Template Gallery where you will find hundreds of templates for each of Google’s Apps.
In the gallery you can:
- Search for a template
- Select the Google App for which you want templates
- Narrow down the templates using categories
- Preview any template
- Open a template you would like to save by clicking on the “Use this template” button
Once you open a template, it will be saved your Google Drive:
Once the template file is saved to Drive, you can continue to use it as a template by right-clicking on the file and selecting the “Make a Copy” option:
Why is the Google Drive Template Gallery Going Away?
According to the website Control Alt Achieve, Google wants to “add features that have been missing to the new template galleries.” This includes the ability to “add your own custom templates for your domain.”
What’s Replacing the Google Drive Template Gallery?
After the Google Drive Template Gallery disappears, you’ll have access to separate template galleries from the home pages of four of Google’s apps:
Unfortunately, the new template galleries offer only a fraction of templates from which to choose. For example, the new Docs template gallery offers 29 as opposed to the hundreds it used to provide:
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