frustrated and confused

Copper Contributor

I am a 68 year old senior having to take on a job to survive as pension is not enough to live on. I am not a computer genius. Due to my job have been forced to learn how to use excel. So here is my main problem. I needed to download a template to excel, no problem their. then filled it out and sent the file to my office. No problem their. My problem is needed a clean template for next pay period. first of all do not fully understand the difference between save and save as. tried to delete info so I could have a clean template to fill in, well it deleted the whole template. do not know how to access a new copy of my template. It is a hassle to download a copy of the template every time I need one. 

5 Replies

@pops1954 Let's focus on Save and Save As. When you Save a file it is stored with the same name that is was give to begin with. when you choose Save As, you can change the name of the file. So, what you need to do with your template is open it and directly save it with another name. Whatever you want to call it for the current pay period. Next time you open the original template and again save it with a different name for the new pay period. That way, you can re-use the template over and over again.

Hi,
You should save your template as (save as!) .xltx file (or .xltm if it should contain macros).
Each time you click on it, Excel creates a new file. No need for reusing old files that way.
Kind regards
Hans

@Riny_van_Eekelen  Thank you for your reply. so I opened the blank template clicked on file then save as. Gave me 4 option's.  1- save a copy to one drive  2- Rename  3- Download a copy to your computer  4- Download a copy to your computer as a ODS file.  So I choose option  2.  Renamed it. used it then went to bring up another blank copy but it just brought up the used file.

@pops1954 You need to download the original template first, so that it's sitting on your computer. Open the downloaded file and choose Save As. Choose where to save it and give it an appropriate name. Next time, you open the original file that you downloaded earlier and do the same for for the following month.

Hi@pops1954 

If you saved the file as a template (XSLT extension) and you double click on it (double click, not File, Open) you should see the content of the file, but without the name of the file: you'll have created a new copy of it, that you can edit and store as you like.

Kind regards

Hans