Excel for Mac: Use Word to Configure Your Default folders

This week in our series about Microsoft Excel for Mac, we discuss Microsoft Word.  We show you why it's needed to set the folders that will be used by Excel for Personal and Workgroup Templates that you can use when you create new workbooks.

Let's get personal

When you go to the 'Home' screen in Excel for Mac and click the 'New' panel, you'll see an offering of templates that you can use to create new workbooks, including the infamous 'Blank Workbook'.  However, these may not suit your needs, and you may have your own personal templates that you'd like to see there.  Personal templates and / or other templates from your organisation may be added here, but you need to know a trick that we'll describe below.

Word to the rescue

To get your personal templates to appear in the ‘Home’ panel, you simply need to specify the folder that contains your templates as the 'User Templates' folder in the application preferences.  The trouble is that even with all the options in Excel's preferences, you won't find that one.  Trust us, you don't have to waste time searching through the Excel preferences.  This doesn't mean you're out of luck.  It just means you need to know this secret that's not easy to discover.  Just fire up Microsoft Word for Mac and check the preferences for ‘File Locations’.  There's no indication that these will affect Excel, but thankfully, they do.

Set Excel preferences in Word?

Since Microsoft applications share many similarities, there are options that affect all the applications (apps), regardless of which app you were using when you changed it.  An example of that is the Office Theme.  If you change it in Excel, it will affect Word and PowerPoint also.  For the 'User templates' file location, you can only set the preference in Word.  It seems unlikely that anyone would be looking for a setting in Excel and think to themselves, "Maybe I should use Word to change this option", but that's how it is.

To set the 'User templates' folder:

• Launch Word and go to Word > Preferences…
• Open the File Locations panel.
• Select 'User templates' and press the Modify… button. 

• Browse to the folder you want to use for your templates and press Open.

Using Personal Templates in Excel

There's nothing special you need to do in Excel once the 'User templates' folder is assigned.  Just go to Home -> New and you'll see the 'Personal' section showing any templates that Excel found in the folder you specified.  The first time you use Excel after setting it up, you may see a warning.  Due to the Mac operating system's sandbox security, you'll need to grant permission for Excel to access that folder.  A warning should appear to that effect, and you can just press the ‘Select…’ button to start the process, as shown below:

In the next dialog that appears, press the ‘Grant Access’ button.

Using Workgroup templates in Excel

Similar to the Personal templates, you can set a folder to show 'Workgroup templates'.  This gives you another option if you have templates from your organisation in one folder and personal templates in another.  The steps are almost the same, just choose 'Workbook templates' when setting it up.  After you configure it, when you go to the 'New' panel in Excel, you'll see a section for 'Work' templates, as shown below.  This setting is also available on Windows, but you can only configure it in Word (Options -> Advanced -> General -> File Locations).

We hope you found this topic helpful.  Check back for more details about Excel for Mac and how it’s different from Excel for Windows.