Word Templates - Downloading
There are a lot of people with nicknames in the D365 community, The CRM Chart Guy, The API Guy, EmojiMegs; these are people synonymous with either a feature or areas of the product(s). With how much I write and present on Word templates, not even the amount that I do at work, I think i’m going to get the nickname Matt “Word Templates” Collins...in fact, I need to find a better name than that.
On my run up to User Group Summit EMEA, where I got to present on Word Templates, I learned a few more things about Word Templates. Anyone who has ever used Word Templates knows there is one big issue with them, how on earth do you download them???
Downloading has been an issue since their introduction in CRM 2016. There is no mechanism in the UI to download a Word Template you have uploaded, so the you had a few options:
Keep a copy either locally or in SharePoint/OneDrive
Use the workflow trick, use a workflow with the setWordTemplate action and point it at a entity which is different from the one the template is created for. I.e. Account Word Template run on a Contact. This tip comes from Adan Vero via CRM Tip of the day.
Luckily the community then came to the rescue and there are 3 XRMToolBox tools which can either download or move Word Templates.
Document Template Export - This can be used to import and export templates.
Document Template Manager - This can upload, download, upload multiple templates and edit the details of the templates. This is my personal favourite for managing document templates.
Document Template Mover - This is a great tool which allows you to push Word Templates between environments and as Word Templates are not solution aware, they can be moved from Dev to UAT to Production.
There are other tools and you can also download it via PowerShell, but if you don't know you can do this, downloading Word Templates can be quite baffling.
When I was preparing for my demo’s and presentation, I was using the UCI more and more and found a button I’d not seen before. Download Word Template!!!
Click on a Word Template enabled record, then choose Word Template from the Ribbon, then down to “View all my templates”. There, you will see a list of your personal templates. If you select one, you will see a download button on the Ribbon. This will enable you to download the template to be edited or updated.
This is a great step forward, but what about system templates, as those are the ones people really use? Well, that’s the unfortunate part at the moment, we still can’t download those through the UCI as the Templates area of D365 is in the settings section and you can’t enable that for UCI or in the new sitemap.
It’s optimistic that they have now enabled it for personal templates, so maybe we will see it for system templates in the near future.
Ciao for now!