Office 2016 template location – not what you expect! Michael White How To April 15, 2015. Like the Windows version you can change the file locations in Mac Office. Click General, for the “At startup, open all files in:” location click “Select” and go to the folder you created. Note: if you have any other files in that folder.

Hi all, A short note so that I can remember, and you can find, the template location for Office 2016 on the Mac. Why do I do this?

It may appear, and certainly Google will agree, that your template location is: ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/My Templates BTW, you get Library by holding do the Option key and select Go. Without the Option key being pressed you will not see it. However, the correct path is: ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User Content/Templates I thought the UBF8T thing might be different for different people but I have checked several different Mac’s and they have the same one.

So now you have the location where you can place your templates and Office will find them. Update: • 3/6/16 – Thanks to Rick I was reminded I had not used the proper slash – should be / rather then.

• 11/25/15 – Thanks to Ian, you can see below in comments where the stock templates are. Certainly not where one might expect. Much appreciate it Ian! • 9/29/15 – A reader (seen below in comments) asked where the stock templates are stored. He wanted to remove them to clean things up. A good question and I was not able to answer. Plus, I looked quite hard, and used Google, and nothing was found.

I even know some of their file names and no luck. Hopefully someone reading this might be able to help? Michael === END ===. Indeed, this is where “user templates” are stored. But Microsoft does a disservice calling them templates.

When I store a template there and then call it up later, the file has the name of the template ad with the dot or dot extensions. Most other programs I use — indeed even Word 2011 — templates open as untitled documents that must be renamed.

This may seem like a minor glitch, but these documents are not really templates. With this type of file behavior, users could just as easily locate their own “template,” saved as a doc or docx file anywhere convenient for them. Of course, they’d have to be careful to rename the document appropriately.. But that’s what you have to do with these Word 2016 non-templates anyway. I hope this (and other problems) are fixed in the final roll out. But I’m not holding my breath.

Thanks so much for this column! Regarding the workgroup vs. User templates: I usually work with Word for PC but I believe this is the same for Mac or PC. Word comes with a default location for user templates as you explained, and it has the ability to set any location you want as the Workgroup templates folder. I would not set the workgroup templates folder to the same location as the user templates folder as someone else suggested because, like you say, they’d both be looking in the same location. Typically a business organization that has “firm” templates set up (maybe letter, memo, fax, proposal, etc.) will put all of their templates in the Workgroup templates folder, or in sub folders of it. That way they can add, change, rename, and delete the firm templates without affecting anything end users are doing in their “My templates” location.

In both the user/my templates and workgroup templates folders, if you create sub folders and put templates in them, they should show up as category/tabs when you go to create a document from “my templates.” The Word default templates that come with word are somewhere else altogether, as you discussed in this thread. I have never removed them but it is my understanding that, with the PC version of Word at least, you can “uninstall” them or tell word not to include them as you’re installing Word.

Though it sounds as if deleting them after the fact works just as well. Let me add a little extra knowledge to this discussion. Like the Windows version you can change the file locations in Mac Office.

However, in the 2016 version the icon only shows up on the Word preferences pane, but any changes affect Excel and Powerpoint too. I use a Dropbox folder so that template changes are available on both my laptop and desktop. In doing this I realised that templates are presented in sub-folder sequence, that is all those in “A” will appear before those in “B”, and so on. I use this to group templates by client. Create bootable usb for windows on mac. Has anybody else lost their Excel template with the latest Mac Office 2016 update? My template is gone from the folder and when I open a new Excel file, my preferred formatting isn’t there. I tried creating a new template (Book.xltx) and saving it in the correct folder, but when I open Excel, the formatting still isn’t there.