If you use Google Docs for the majority of your work, you may notice that you use the same document layout over and over again. Instead of copying formatting and styles from old documents, it’s much easier to create a template for that specific kind of document. That way, when you want to produce a newdocument of that type, you can load up the Google Docs template and have the mundane work already done for you.

At one time Google Docs used to have a feature where you could create a template and submit it to a template gallery. This made it very easy to set up a template to use repeatedly for new documents. However, Google has since stripped custom templates out of regular Google Docs and moved it to their GSuite service, which requires regular payment to use. Regular users can still use Google’s pre-made templates but not upload their own. For users who don’t want to pay just to make a template, let’s look at how to manually create a template on your own.