Templates Overview

In Accolade, templates are the starting point for creating process documents for deliverables and activities, Excel reports, Project schedules, and other documents. Using templates provides consistency across similar documents across all the projects within your organization. Templates can exist for the following:

• Deliverables and activities
• Gate documents
• Online forms
• Idea forms
• Microsoft Project plans)
• Display images (currently supported for page layouts)
• Any document that your company uses as a template outside of Accolade

Template Access

Anyone in your organization can create a document that you decide to use as a template. However, only Administrators and Process Designers with the Template Access user role can add templates to the Template Library, which is the repository for templates available within Accolade. Anyone with Template Access can view the templates that align with their access groups. Administrators and Process Designers that have Template Access have the ability to add, remove, edit, or view templates that they share access groups with and have edit rights in those access groups.

Other roles have no access to the Template Library; however, they can download template files when they start to work on their documents within a project.

Smart Templates

A "smart" template is an Excel, Word, or PowerPoint file that includes Accolade data in the document, pulled from the Accolade database each time the template (or document version) is downloaded. Rich text metrics do not display in Excel or Word smart templates but they do display in PowerPoint.

Smart templates allow users to:

• Include the most up-to-date metric and project metadata values from the Accolade database.
• Maintain project metrics in deliverables by uploading values from the document to the database (Word files with specific-metric types only and specific Excel documents).
• Include the most up-to-date values from reference tables.

Accolade data is added to the document using Accolade field codes, which map data in the Accolade database to a place within the document, or named ranges to add Accolade online reports and other tables to Excel. For more information about field codes, see Accolade Field Codes Overview. Smart documents only work for documents that are uploaded into Accolade. Data does not refresh if the document is created as a link to an external document.

A document can be "smart" and not be added to Accolade as a template in the Template Library.

The following document types can include field codes to become "smart" documents or templates:

• Excel -.xlsx, .xlsm, .xltx, .xltm
• Word -.docx, .docm, .dotx, .dotm
• PowerPoint- .pptx, .pptm, .potx, .potm, .ppsx, .ppsm

See the following to get started:

• Template Best Practices
• Adding Templates to the Template Library
• Importing and Exporting Templates
• Templates to Update Project Data Overview (Smart Excel)