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Template Zone - High Impact Software Reviews - OfficeReady Pro

Template Zone - OfficeReady Pro

From: The Bridge-Journal of the Memphis PC User's Group
Volume 19 Number 11 Nov - Dec 2003

Templates. Lots of them. Templates for Word. Templates for Excel. Templates for PowerPoint. We've been talking about templates at our monthly meetings.

OfficeReady Pro is a complete package that includes a tidy interface called the Template Browser and hundreds of useful templates for three of Microsoft Office's most popular programs. The interface serves to organize your templates by program and category and lets you preview a template before opening it.

Some of the reasons users are interested in templates is because someone has taken the time to build in formulas or macros that are beyond our skill level or someone has given a professional look to a document or form. There's also the fairly universal need to just save time. And, while Office has gotten easier to use, it has also grown more complex. The basic need for a good set of templates remains.

Show me the . . .

The full listing of templates is available at TemplateZone. Have a look, in this review I am only scratching the surface. Under Word you get 27 business forms, 15 choices for a fax cover sheet, 13 variants of a memo, five that can be used to manage a project and 13 templates that can be classified as marketing material.

These are not cheesy documents. There are more for the family and home, like labels and cards. You get resume templates and certificate blanks. I am just getting started on the many templates available for Word.

Excel has 26 for personal finance: a 401K planner, a sheet for balloon loans, buy or lease decisions, a capital gains and losses calculator, four retirement worksheets and a financial calculator. There are even more for office use.

The PowerPoint templates consist of lots and lots of themes and backgrounds for your slide presentations. Yes, I have purchased sets of justPowerPoint templates for more then the cost of OfficeReady Pro.

And, the PowerPoint templates have sample slides representing most of the standard slide configurations, so it goes beyond just a pretty background. It should make preparing a new presentation a snap.

I counted nine topic categories with about 100 templates to choose from.
The Find function allows you to search through your all your templates for a particular topic or name. I gave it a try. That's where I learned I had 522 templates.

You wanna make it personal?

When you load OfficeReady Pro you are asked to enter personal information, e.g., name, address, phone, e-mail, that can replace boilerplate text when you open a template for the first time - a nice touch. OfficeReady includes a built-in photo editor, watermark insertion utility and pdf conversion utility. Yes, you can use OfficeReady Pro as your PDF conversion utility. You can buy additional individual templates or packs of templates from www.templatezone.com to add on to your collection. You download them and they are integrated right into the OfficeReady Pro interface. There's a button to go look for more templates.

I wanted to know whether I might be able to put other templates, e.g., from Microsoft's Template Gallery (http:// office.microsoft.com/ templates/officeready-pro.aspx) or templates that I use regularly for memos and such. There was no mention in the Help files and because of the way the templates are indexed in OfficeReady Pro, I suspect integrating them would require a major hack. It is something I think the decision-makers at the Template Zone might want to think about for the next version.

Help = manual

I printed the entire Help file. I used it to get oriented to the program's features and now have it bound. It serves as the manual. You probably won't need it, but readers of my reviews know I like manuals. I bought my first set of templates to go with Ami Pro many years ago. I still think they are useful and appreciate what it takes to produce a well-designed template. These are first rate.