NARRATOR: Templates are a collection of styles and formatting settings that can save you a lot of time when creating a new document using the same guidelines. This tutorial will go through the steps to create your own NIH Formatted template.
It is difficult to find explicit guidelines from the NIH regarding formatting expectations for research guides. However, using a compilation of grant, paper, and funding proposal guidelines, we will be creating an NIH document template with the following formatting settings: margins of ½ inch; font selections will be one of the following: Arial, Palatino Linotype, Georgia, or Helvetica; the font color must be black; and a font size of 11 points or higher must be used.
Let’s begin by creating a color setting of black and white. First you need to click on the Change Styles icon. Then you should click on the Colors icon from the drop-down menu. Going through option by option, use the drop-down down menu to select black for font text and white for background colors.
I have chosen to keep the Hyperlink color blue and the Followed Hyperlink color purple. However, you can change them both to black if you so choose. Be sure you remember to give this color setting a name. Make sure the name is descriptive and meaningful to you.
You can check your work by going back to Change Styles, selecting Colors from the drop-down-down menu and then looking for your custom-named template.
To change the font settings, we will go to the Home tab, select change Styles and select Fonts in the drop-down-down menu. We’ll go to the bottom of the font list and select Create New Theme Fonts.
Select your desired heading and body fonts, which should be the same from the choices approved by NIH. Make sure you also remember to give this font selection a name that is meaningful to you and push save. Your newly created font theme should be highlighted.
There are over 50 style selections in Microsoft Word 2010. In the Home tab menu bar, hover over the style selection you would like to modify and right click while the selection is highlighted. Next, select Modify in the menu that appears.
Click on the Format button in the lower left hand corner to make additional changes.
As a note, the built in options for paragraph spacing should be sufficient and there is no need to alter these settings in each style.
We can change the page margins by selecting Margins from the Page Layout menu bar and selecting Narrow, which will give us ½ inch margin on all sides of the page.
You’ll note that the most commonly used styles are shown in the Home tab menu bar Style Section. To have an easier navigation bar with which to apply specific style options, select the Apply Styles option in the drop-down down menu.
The most important thing to remember when making style selection changes is that you need to select the New Documents With This Template radio button. This will make sure your style selection modification will happen on every template formatted document.
Captions are often used in NIH formatted documents and it is not one of the recommended style selections that appears in our Style menu bar from the Home tab. To find the captions style section, hover over the small arrow directly under the Change Styles icon and click on it.
Next, click on the blue Options link in the bottom right hand corner. In the Style Pane Options box, choose All Styles from the drop-down down options in the Select Styles to Show fields.
Scroll down until you find the Caption style section. Once you've highlighted the Caption style selection, click on the down arrow and choose Modify.
In this tutorial, we have only modified the Normal style and the Caption style but it might be a good idea to also modify the Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles to create easy headers and titles in NIH documents.
When you have completed all of your style modifications, you need to save your template. From the File tab, choose the Save As option.
After giving your template a name, click on the Save as Type drop-down down menu and select Word Template (.dotx) extension.
Make sure you are saving the template in your Microsoft Template folder.
Here you can see my organization of NIH templates. When you are ready to create a new document from your template select My Templates and double click on your desired template and a new Microsoft Word document will open. When you are ready to save the new document, just make sure it is saved as a .doc or .docx file.
For additional information on NIH requirements or how to set up a meeting with an Informationist, please visit http://guides.lib.umich.edu/nihpublicaccesspolicy.