Microsoft Office Templates & Add-ins

Companies with a strong brand identity need to ensure that all their customer-facing documents reinforce their brand. These documents are usually typeset by expensive professional services, extending the timeframe and limiting the number of documents that can be produced.

When a document is typeset, text must be manually transcribed and the person creating the document is often not the person who understands the content. The review/edit cycle becomes much longer since more people are involved, and since there may be two versions of the document being edited (the 'source' version and the typeset version).

Our templates alleviate these problems by ensuring that fully-branded documents can be quickly and easily created by anyone in the company. The templates use Microsoft Office tools that users are already familiar with. There is no need to involve another department in the document-creation process and thus all associated errors and expense is eliminated.

As part of the solution, we will typically create basic Microsoft Office templates for each document type, having all the correct fonts, logos, colours, etc. We then provide add-ins that that add a “branding” toolbar to each application, which has buttons to automatically create complex branding elements such as tables, charts and side-bars.

Add-ins can also be provided to apply the brand-specific style & formatting to existing charts and tables, making it easy to update existing content. They can also include document-specific business logic and can if necessary be an integrated part of a larger system.

Case Studies

• Barclays - Smart Template enabling users to rapidly create loan facilities letters for clients and intermediaries.
• Scottish Equitable - Smart Template enabling users to rapidly create tender propositions for clients and intermediaries.
• Oriel - Creation of market research notes and bulletins using Microsoft Office applications Word and Excel which integrate with Oriel's database and SharePoint website.
• Ambrian - Development of a suite of Microsoft Word templates for their key documents, and a set of Excel tools for quickly formatting charts.
• GAM - Development of a small suite of document templates and Microsoft Word add-ins that enabled prospectuses to be typeset in MS Word
• Lombard - Development of a Microsoft Word template for Lombard’s Global Investment Opportunities report and a set of Word and Excel add-ins for quickly formatting and inserting charts, tables and side-bars