TurboLaw® Time and Billing gives you ultimate control over how your bills and statements look by allowing you to apply templates. These templates contain styles and formatting that will be applied to your bills and statements when you print them. When you want to go beyond the templates that are included with TurboLaw® Time and Billing, you can customize your template and make your own changes. Because you have ultimate control, you can customize your template to make it look just the way you want.
Additional help on customizing templates can be found at the TurboLaw® Time and Billing Help Center's How-To Video section.
TurboLaw® Time and Billing comes with many built-in templates. If you choose to create your own custom template, you should make sure you save it with a different name from the built-in templates. The built-in templates are considered part of TurboLaw® Time and Billing, and may be updated from time to time. If you make changes to one of the built-in templates, but don't save it with a different name, your changes may be lost if the template is updated. For this reason, it is always recommended to use Save As to save your custom templates with a name of your own choosing.
You can select the Save As option by clicking the small downward-pointing arrow on the Save button in the template designer.
The template designer used by TurboLaw® Time and Billing has many features in common with popular desktop publishing software. You can lay out text, draw lines and other shapes, drag merged fields into the template (which will merged with your information when the template is used to prepare a bill or statement), and generally control the layout as you see fit.
For a detailed explanation of all the items in this window, see: the Template Designer window.
The dotted background you see is simply a visual guide called the grid. It helps align items with one another by providing a common point of reference.
Templates can be customized by changing the text, font, size, color, or position of any existing element. You can move items with your mouse, and you can use the controls at the top of the screen to change text, font, size and color. These controls work just like those in any common word-processor.
New items (such as a text label) can be added to the template by either clicking and dragging from the control palette on the left side of the screen, or by clicking once and then dragging with your mouse to draw the size of the item on the template itself.
The property grid on the lower-right side of the screen can be used to adjust the properties of whatever is currently selected. For example, if a table is selected, you can adjust the borders (color, size, and placement). Most items will have many properties - to see a description of the property, just click on it. The description will appear in the bottom-right corner of the window.
Fields which are marked with the orange cylinder are merged fields. When the template is used to generate a bill or statement, these merged fields will fill in with the data (dates, amounts, etc.) for the "line items" on the bill or statement.
A full list of available merge fields is available by clicking the Field List tab of the Report Explorer, in the top-right corner of the window.
Merge fields generally need to appear in the Detail section of a template in order to be filled out. The detail section is repeated for every "line item" in a bill or statement.
If you don't want a particular merged field to appear in your template, you can delete it simply by selecting it and pressing the Delete key on your keyboard.
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