How to Find Templates in Excel

Pre-made Excel templates are one of the most useful, yet overlooked, features for anyone working with data. Instead of building a report or tracker from a blank slate, you can use a professionally designed starting point for everything from budget planning to project management. This guide will show you exactly how to find, use, and even create your own Excel templates.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Why Bother With Excel Templates?

Before jumping into how to find them, it’s worth understanding why they’re so valuable. If you regularly build spreadsheets, templates can completely change your workflow for the better.

• Save a Ton of Time: Why reinvent the wheel? Whether you need an invoice, a content calendar, or a GANTT chart, someone has already figured out a good layout and the necessary formulas. A template gives you an instant 90% solution, letting you focus on the data itself instead of the formatting.
• Ensure Accuracy and Consistency: Templates often come with pre-built formulas and conditional formatting. This reduces the risk of manual errors and ensures that reports your team creates all follow a consistent structure.
• Discover Best Practices: By looking at how official Microsoft templates are built, you can learn new techniques. You might discover a useful function, a clever chart type, or a smart way to organize data that you can apply to your own future work.
• Get a Professional-Looking Result: Let’s be honest - not everyone is a spreadsheet design expert. Templates provide clean layouts, balanced color schemes, and easy-to-read charts that give your work a polished, professional look right from the start.

How to Find Built-In Templates Inside Excel

The easiest way to get started is with the massive library of templates that comes included with modern versions of Excel. Getting to it is simple and takes just a few clicks.

1. The Startup Screen

When you first open the Excel application, before you even open a file, you're greeted with the startup screen. Right below the "Blank workbook" option, you’ll see a row of suggested templates like "Basic personal budget" or "Academic calendar." This is your first entry point. Right from this screen, you can also see a link called "More templates," which takes you to the main template library.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

2. The "New" Menu (Your Template Hub)

If you already have a workbook open, you can access the full library by going to the main menu.

1. Click on File in the top-left corner.
2. Select New from the sidebar menu.

This brings you to the main template gallery, which is where the real power lies. Here, you have two primary ways to find what you need: searching and browsing.

3. Using the Search Bar

Just above the suggested template categories is a large search bar that says "Search for online templates." This is your best tool. Simply type in keywords for what you need. Be descriptive but not overly complex. Here are some examples of effective search terms:

• For project management: "project plan," "Gantt chart," "project tracker"
• For personal finance: "budget," "loan amortization," "personal monthly budget," "net worth tracker"
• For business needs: "invoice," "business plan," "inventory list," "sales report," "balance sheet"
• For general planning: "calendar," "to-do list," "weekly schedule," "content calendar"

Once you search, Excel presents you with thumbnails of all matching templates provided by Microsoft and its user community.

4. Browsing by Category

If you aren't sure exactly what you need, browsing the categories below the search bar is a great way to explore. Microsoft organizes its templates into useful themes like:

• Business: Find templates for financial statements, invoices, company memos, and inventory.
• Personal: A great place to find party planners, personal budgets, household chore charts, and wedding checklists.
• Planners and Trackers: This category is filled with calendars, to-do lists, mortgage calculators, and fitness logs.
• Budgets: As the name suggests, you'll find tons of different budgeting spreadsheets, from simple expense trackers to detailed household budgets.
• Charts: If you just need a well-designed chart, you can find templates pre-formatted for waterfalls, funnels, and more.

5. Previewing and Opening a Template

Once you click on a template thumbnail from either the search results or a category list, a preview window pops up. This window gives you a larger view of the template, a brief description of what it does, and who published it (usually Microsoft). If this is the one you want, just click the "Create" button. Excel will download the template and open it as a brand new, untitled workbook (.xlsx file). Your original template file remains untouched, so you can use it again and again.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Creating and Saving Your Own Templates

Once you’ve perfected a spreadsheet - say, a weekly sales report or a monthly marketing dashboard you use all the time - you can save it as your own template. This prevents you from having to "Save As a Copy" and manually clear out the old data each time.

Saving a workbook as a template file (.xltx) makes it a master copy. When you open a template, Excel automatically creates a new, standard workbook file based on it, leaving your original template clean and ready for next time.

How to Save a Custom Template

1. Perfect Your Workbook: Open the spreadsheet you want to turn into a template. Delete any old data but keep the headers, formulas, charts, and formatting exactly as you want them for the future. You're creating a reusable shell.
2. Go to "Save As": Click File > Save As.
3. Choose the File Type: This is the most important step. In the "Save as type" dropdown menu, select Excel Template (*.xltx).
4. Save in the Right Folder: As soon as you select ".xltx," Excel automatically changes the save location to a special folder, typically found at C:\Users\[YourUsername]\Documents\Custom Office Templates. Keep it this folder! Saving it here is what makes it easily accessible within Excel.
5. Name It and Save: Give your template a descriptive name (e.g., "Weekly Marketing KPI Report Template") and click Save.

How to Access Your Custom Templates

Once saved, how do you find it again? Go back to File > New. Right underneath the search box, you will see two tabs: Office and Personal (this might be called Custom in some versions). Click on Personal, and you’ll see any templates you've created and saved in that special "Custom Office Templates" folder. Just click on your template to create a new workbook from it.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Extra Tip: Finding Templates Online

While Excel’s built-in library is extensive, sometimes you need something more specific or advanced. There are many reputable sources online for free and premium templates.

First stop should be Microsoft's own site: templates.office.com. It often has templates that may not be featured directly inside the app. Beyond that, sites like Vertex42 and Spreadsheet123 have been providing high-quality, reputable Excel templates for years, covering everything from complex financial modeling to simple home management. Just be cautious when downloading files from the internet. Stick to well-known sites to avoid files containing malicious macros.

Final Thoughts

Excel templates are an incredible productivity hack, saving you time on formatting and setup so you can focus on analyzing your data. Whether you use the thousands of built-in options or create your own custom templates for recurring reports, it's a fundamental skill for anyone looking to get more out of Excel.

Eventually, many people find that even the best templates become tedious for marketing and sales reporting. You still have to manually export data from Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify, or Salesforce and copy it into the spreadsheet. At that point, the process is crying out for automation. That's precisely why we built Graphed, which automates the whole process by connecting directly to your data sources, creating real-time dashboards that never need manual updates, and letting you analyze performance just by asking questions in plain English.