When you’re competing in the cutthroat world of business, you need to follow up every single possible advantage to help you succeed.  One of the most important tools in this struggle is the complete and thoroughly consistent branding of your business – and all the tools of your business. A consistent brand helps build customer loyalty and perceived brand trust and is one of the best ways to manage your company’s optics.  That being said, a complete branding solution will offer branding to even something as simple as your work order templates. Many people might see this as such an insignificant thing to consider that they decide it’s not worth the time to bother creating a customized work order template for their business. But when you’re using them on a regular basis, the branding of work order form can be a hugely successful improvement, improving sales follow-through and your conversion rates. As if that wasn’t enough, since you’ll be leaving a copy of the work order form with the customer, it’s basically like leaving a tiny little advertisement that they will see every time they review the form.

For more on creating your own customized work order template from scratch, stay tuned for our upcoming post on the subject. But if you’re not interested in spending the time to create your own (a grand total of 30 minutes, at the outside), you can do your best find a work order template that is already designed with all the fields you need. We’ll shortly be uploading a large series of work order templates for you to work from and improve on, but a custom template is still the best option in the long run. Remember that it does look a lot more professional to use a customized and fully-branded template that doesn’t have any extraneous fields or irrelevant sections – in design, form should follow function (no pun intended) – meaning that it should do the job it’s intended to and not do anything it’s not intended to do. You don’t want to confuse the customer who needs to fill out the form (or if it’s intended for office staff, you want to minimize errors and the learning curve associated with new business tools), as this will end up causing headaches for you down the road.

In the end, the real message is that branding needs to be your number one priority. You wouldn’t use unbranded stationary or signage, so why would you let your company use unbranded work order templates? Take the time to customize your templates, and you’ll see a direct improvement in your work order conversion rates.

Templates can be a real timesaver for your company. They allow you to speed up administrative tasks and focus on your real business, instead of the tools that let you run your business. But when something especially unique is called for, such as a work order template, it’s often a good idea to make your own template from scratch, or at least modify another template to make sure that it covers everything that your business needs from it. You can look through the list of templates we’ve located around the web on the rest of our website, but here we’re going to focus on how you can make your own from scratch.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to create a template in Microsoft Word 2010, but you can use your own similar program such as Open Office if that’s your choice. The idea is generally the same, although the exact steps will be a bit different. If you want to learn how to make a template for Microsoft Excel 2010, we’ll be preparing a similar tutorial soon. If you’re planning to use a previous version of Microsoft Word, such as Microsoft Word 2007 or 2003, you’ll find the steps are very similar to this tutorial, and you should be able to figure it out for your specific version based on the steps we discuss here, because these three versions are very similar in presentation and style.

The first step is to create your document. Open your program, and go to File -> New. Choose ‘Blank Document’. (Note: If you want to work from a model template and just customize it, that’s fine and now’s the time to do it – Office.com has a wide range of templates that can be downloaded straight from within Word 2010!).

Enter in all the fields and information that is necessary for your work order form. Consider adding in your company logo or letterhead to make it look properly official, and make sure that you offer clearly marked contact information in case the person filling out your form has any questions. Make things as clear as possible, since although things may seem obvious to you, they might not be obvious to someone who didn’t design the template. Remember that you only want to include text, data, and images that are going to be used on every single work order form.

Once you’re satisfied with your template, we’ve reached the magic step. Go to File -> Save As, and enter your file name – make sure to be descriptive and include a date for future reference – but instead of choosing ‘Word Document’ in the dropdown menu below the filename, choose ‘Word Template’, which will give the file the .dotx file extension (if you’re not sure, file extensions help you and your computer figure out what program should be used to open/edit each file on your computer). That’s all there is to it! If you’re interested in making a .PDF (Portable Document Format) template, be sure to stay tuned, since that’s what we’ll tackle next!

When you run a small business, efficiency has to be your number one priority. When you’re working with small staff and tight margins, every second counts, and one of the simplest ways to speed up your business is to use computer-generated templates for all your document preparation needs. They allow you to focus on actually completing your work, instead of getting bogged down in re-inventing the wheel (or the work order form, as the case may be). Templates are available from a wide variety of different sources, and are available for almost any possible conceivable business purpose from work orders to work schedules to boilerplate legal contracts. Just be sure to have a qualified lawyer review any documents you plan to use professionally or you might find yourself in trouble down the line.

Depending on your chosen office productivity software, you might have a whole set of templates already installed on your computer. If you use Microsoft Office 2010, you can view the templates that are accessible from Office.com by simply opening your program of choice (probably Word or Excel) and clicking File, then New. Below the list of templates that are locally available, you’ll see a huge number of categories available from Office.com, each of which contains a number of different styles you can choose from. There are so many, in fact, that you’re sure to find something that fits your need, and your company aesthetic.

If you can’t find a template you like, you can always download one that’s close to your choice and then modify it to suit your needs. It can then be saved as a new blank template that will contain all your customizations and adjustments, ready for your or your employees to use.

Hi, I’m John Smith!
I live in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
I’ve been involved since January 14th, 2012!
I could write more about myself here if I wanted, to trick people into thinking I’m not a Disney character! (Just kidding – people always make that joke!)

My interests online are wide-ranging, and I love to contribute to my friend’s blogs to help encourage and maintain a vibrant and active online community, and I love hearing from my readers and other bloggers who are active in the same subject areas as me! My top interests are higher education and having fun – I work hard and I play hard!! ^_^ But I also love:
Soccer | Blogging | Learning new languages!! | Writing | Playing the tuba | Live bands

The Fully Researched classes I attended here in Boston have been really helpful in developing my English skills and also teaching me the basics of the WordPress blogging platform, as well as building my writing skills – it’s helped me to get a job in the field that I love! If you’re interested in any of those things, I really recommend that you check out their website and get involved – you could start working towards your dream today! If they don’t have classes in your area, you might be able to sign up for instructor training and start your own Fully Researched classes in your hometown!