What I do

Artwork for MS Office should be set up in RGB.

Colour specs should all be RGB. If you are using percentage tints, I need the actual RGB value to reproduce that tint e.g. 5% black would be something like 248 248 248.

If there are less than six colours in the brand, consider some curated complimentary colours for charts and smart art. Well implemented brand colours can do wonders. If you need more than six colours, lets chat. There are a few different ways to approach that.

A PDF of the final art will usually do, INDD packages are useful for more complex work but not always necessary. I generally don’t need completely separated assets, what are useful are page backgrounds in PNG or JPG.

Clear understanding of what is variable including photos and graphics, what should be a bit hard to change (e.g. office addresses or phone number set as editable text in the header of a letterhead), and what is to be completely fixed (e.g. a legal disclaimer set as a picture as a page background or footer graphic). Include in this whether you would prefer vector art or png/jpg; there are pros and cons with either.

PowerPoint art for screen or projector use should be set up at 19.05 cm high; 33.867 cm wide for 16:9 and 25.4 cm wide for 4:3.

PowerPoint art for printing (yes, sometimes people use PowerPoint for printed documents) should be set up using A4 or A3 dimensions.

Things I'm going to ask you about:

This is where my IT support experience comes handy 😉

How many users will be using this template?

Generally, how technically adept in MS Office are they?

• Highly technical corporate office workers who use MS Office all day in their jobs,
• A mix of proficiencies, some more technical than others, or
• Specialists in areas other than MS Office.

I've seen the results of overly complex templates going over the heads of users who wind up deliberately working around what they don’t understand or don’t want and creating a mess. No one wins.

A question that might need to be relayed to their IT department/contact is: What version of Windows and Office are they using? Do they have an SOE?

Organisations who have any kind of IT support department or support provider generally have what's known as a Standard Operating Environment (SOE). An SOE means everyone is using the same version of Windows and Office, and the laptops and desktops are all very similar if not identical.

Some smaller organisations don’t have an SOE, instead they have a mix of different makes of PC, versions of Windows and MS Office. If that's the case, I'll need to know what the earliest version of Office in use.

The reason for all the operating environment questions is that Office 2010 and prior versions lay out tables by default differently, also knowing what version of Office is in use helps if I need to guide someone over the phone.

Are there Mac users that will need to use the template? What version of Office for Mac are they using?

If this template is to replace an existing one, I'd like a copy of the old one and some examples of documents based on it if possible.

If it's an updated report or presentation, there will be an expectation that all or most their existing content will need to be reformatted into the new look and this could easily be a huge amount of stuff.

The way the new template is built can make that job easy or very hard.  Knowing well what their existing template(s) and documents are like is critical for making conversion/reformatting easy. I like easy.