Project templates are extremely useful because many companies carry out similar or standard projects repeatedly, particularly in the case of projects that are externally billable to clients. Rather than entering all the tasks, resources, dates, services and prices each time, creating a project as a copy or with reference to a template allows this information to be defined once and then re-used on each new project.

When building project templates it is important to consider the following:

• What information is more or less the same for all projects for this template, and can be maintained in the template? For example task descriptions, types, durations and planned efforts might be part of the template (the same for all projects) but resources, customer and requesters might be better left blank in the template (because it varies from project to project)
• How many templates to create and how to best name them? If your company delivers a range of different projects there is a trade off between creating a large number of templates for each unique variation - causing a management overhead and increase risk of selecting the wrong template, vs. having a reduced number of templates - resulting in more manual adjustments after creating a new project from a template. In either case make your template name as descriptive as possible.

To create your library of template projects create each project as normal and mouse-over the save button to bring up the save options menu. Select "Save as Template" from the save menu. Click here for more information on working with templates.

Click on the open button (folder icon in the diagram above) and select "Open Templates" to edit an existing template.

You cannot normally make templates into active documents, it is best to create active projects from a template instead. However, if you delete a template project and then undelete it, it will become an active project.

From the "more" button menu on the far-right of the toolbar select "Create from Template" choose the appropriate template to use for this new project. All templates will be listed in the Create from Template sub-menu.

When a project is created from a template, or when a project is copied from another project, the following occurs:

1. Project header, resources, service rates and tasks on this project are copied
2. Task and project dates, durations, planned efforts and resources are copied. You can always adjust the new project dates and reschedule the tasks accordingly
3. Task comments and files are copied so it recommended to keep comments and files on template projects and task to a minimum
4. Any references to billing/sales customers or task requesters are copied so if you want users to key these in each time then leave them off the template project
5. Actuals such as time booked or expenses incurred, against the project is not copied. All the tasks in the new project will have % complete and actuals both as zero.

Copying one project to another is an acceptable alternative to creating with reference to a template. While copying does not rely on a template set-up in advance, creating from a template has a couple of benefits:

1. Variable data such as customer can be left off the template
2. Template projects won't show up in your various project dashboards, lists and reports.