Web Worker Daily

While web workers don’t always work all day in the same physical environments as standard office workers, they do often need the same electronic and paper-based business collateral as everyone else. The good news is that templated documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are available for free, so you don’t have to build everything from brochures to letterhead from the ground up.

Hewlett-Packard offers a very broad array of free templates for business use online.  Of special interest there are the “Business Identity Kits” that HP offers. These are not just one-shot templates for this or that type of business document; instead, they are offered as unified ensembles that coordinate designs for your letterhead, envelopes, brochures and more.

If you scan the designs for HP’s business identity kits, you’ll see themes such as Urban Modern, Traditional Elegance, Trendy Eclectic and more. Let’s say I want to choose Modern Elegance as my document theme. As you’ll see here I can get Microsoft Word-compatible templates for business cards, monthly calendars, envelopes, flyers, proposals, newsletters, presentation slides (in PowerPoint format) and more–all using the central theme that I chose.

Microsoft has a huge library of useful templates online. Users at large create many of the templates, their quality is voted on, and the top-rated templates rise to the top in categories such as Expense Reports, Brochures, Letters to Prospective New Employees, Resumes and CVs, Calendars, Business Cards, Stationery, and more. You can search through them here.

If you happen to use the open source OpenOffice collection of productivity applications, there are also many useful templates for it online. You’ll find templates for balance sheets, flow charts, invoices and more standard documents such as letterhead and newsletters.