Turn any section of a story, including its styles, media, effects, and transitions into a template that can be easily added to any other story. Templates are a one-time snapshot of a section, intended to be used to speed up workflow and support brand consistency. Create a template library of useful sections to use as-is or with further edits in future stories.

There are three types of section templates:

When starting a new blank story or adding a new section to a story, you'll be presented with a panel that shows a range of section types to choose from. Each section type has a default layout with some example content that is intended to be modified by you, and as such, the default content is a template. Along with the default templates for each section type, Shorthand also provides some alternate styles in named categories on the left edge of the panel. Shorthand manages the default and alternate templates and their categories in this section.

Have a section you think would be useful to use again in other stories? Easily replicate the layout, style, and effects of a section, or reuse the style and content, by saving a section of your story as a template. This creates a copy of the section in your own section template library, from where it can be added to any story and then further edited.

Personal section templates are unique per user. Each user can create personal section templates from any story in any of their teams.

To save a section as a template, click the star icon next to the section thumbnail in the story editor:

When saving a section as a template, you'll be prompted to give it a name and category in order to more easily find it within your library of templates. These templates are only available to you (though you can share the story with anyone else in your team and they may choose to also save some sections as templates).

As with the Shorthand default section templates, your personal section templates are available when you choose to add a new section to your story, and are shown after clicking the option labelled "Your templates":

The name and category you have assigned to your saved templates can be modified by selecting the pencil icon in the top right of the section thumbnail in the Your templates section of the panel:

Using the same menu, templates can be deleted from your library.

If you have provided category names when creating templates, these categories will be displayed on the left of the panel. Clicking any of the category names will show all the templates you've assigned to the same category name. In this way you could, for instance, have several templates you've assigned as 'Headings', multiple for 'Author profiles', or 'Image galleries', etc. Using template names and categories that are meaningful to you and the types of stories you create will make it easier to manage your template library.

Team leaders have the ability to create section templates that are available to all members of the workspace. This is a useful way to provide a library of approved or recommended layouts, styles, and effects to a team in order to aid brand consistency and speed up the process of story creation. You and other members of your workspace can then easily build a story from a set of pre-styled and approved 'building blocks' that can further be edited as needed.

These custom templates can be titled, described, and categorised. You may, for instance, have categories of templates based on their suitability for use in a particular type of story (eg one category for 'Internal stories' and one for 'Public comms') or by product type (eg, different categories for templates suitable for stories about Product A, Product B, and Product C).

For team leaders, creating a workspace template is a two-step process. Firstly, create or locate a story section to turn into a template, and click the star icon next to its thumbnail in the editor (exactly as you would to create a personal template):

A form will appear from which you can choose to save the template to "Your templates" or to a set belonging to your workspace. In the image below the workspace is called "ACME Design", so the options presented to a team leader in the workspace when saving a template are "Your templates" and "ACME Design":
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As with personal templates, you are also prompted to name the template, provide a description, and assign it a category. These attributes can greatly assist your workspace members in finding appropriate templates and understanding how and where they are to be used.

When a template is saved to your workspace set, every user in your workspace will be able to see it when opening the section chooser, along with their own saved templates, and those created by Shorthand.

Team leaders can modify how their workspace templates are described by using the edit buttons on each template to change its name, description, and/or category - or to delete a template from the set.

The content of a template cannot be directly modified. Instead, if you wish to make changes to a template, add it to a story, edit it there, and save this new version as a workspace template before deleting the original from the set.

As with personal section templates, workspace templates are a snapshot of when they were created, rather than a 'live' style that can be modified to update multiple stories. Once a template is added to a story, there is no ongoing link to the template. This safeguards against unforeseen changes to multiple stories in your workspace.

From your Shorthand dashboard, open the story where you would like to insert the templated section, and click the + button to Add section. Then from the Your templates category in the section panel, or the category named after your workspace, select the template to insert it into the story.

Once added to a story, the section can be edited in any way you wish, just as if it were one of the default section templates. Copied sections inherit the theme of the story into which they are inserted (some colours may not be the same if the story from which the template was created used a different theme to the one in which it is now used).

If you wish to add more than one section to your story at a time, click the checkbox in the top right of multiple section thumbnails. The order in which multiple sections are inserted is the order in which they appear in the panel.

You can remove individual sections from the Your templates panel by clicking the red trash bin icon in the top right of any of the section thumbnails, or use the checkbox to select multiple sections to delete. Deleting a saved section from this panel does not remove sections from any story that used the template.