In my daytime income producing activity I get to edit a lot of documents. Most of those documents are based on templates of one form or another. Over time I have developed a list of the things that I hate about various templates and I thought I’d share them here for template designers everywhere.

The Top 5 signs that your document template has “Issues”:

  1. You are cutting and pasting the same text from one section to another
    This means that the template is badly organised because the same information is in more than 1 place in the document. If this is happening the template needs to be reorganised so that each piece of information is included once and once only. This is a violation of the DRY principle.
  2. You are cutting and pasting “boilerplate” text from other documents of the same type.
    The whole point of having a template is to keep you from having to type the same thing with minor variations over and over again. If you are doing that anyway then maybe the boilerplate should be moved into the template itself.
  3. You are cutting and pasting text from other documents of a different type but about the same subject.
    This is another violation of the DRY principle but this time it means that there is more than 1 source document for a particular piece of information. If any of that information changes someone has to remember to update it in all of the places that it lives and this can very easily lead to inconsistency.
  4. You are constantly scrolling backwards and forwards to refer to information in other places in the document to complete a certain section or you find yourself printing out pages from other places in the document to refer to.
    In this case the template is poorly designed because the sections that logically belong together are scattered throughout the document. The remedy is to reorder the sections so that they flow more logically. If this is impossible due to the interconnectedness of everything then this is a sign that there should be more than 1 document or that a document is the wrong way to represent the information and that perhaps a tool would be better.
  5. You keep making the same edits to the document template text in every new document you write from the template.
    This is just lack of maintenance of the template. It may seem easier just to make the change but just think of all the people making all those little changes, you’d be surprised at how much effort it adds up to. It would most probably save time if you took the time to update the template.