Your tender template is whack… sorry.

By Zoe Webber, Tender Specialist and resident Word Wizard

Microsoft Word is usually my best friend but sometimes it’s nemesis. When it works, this incredible application can streamline drafting, editing, and formatting. You can quickly change large chunks of text to look the same and create consistent table designs with the push of a button.

It’s when it doesn’t work then I rip out my hair.

Despite my self-appointed title as the Word Wizard at Tender Plus, I am mostly self-taught and even after 2+ years of day-in-day-out use, I still run into a number of issues when trying to navigate formatting in Word. When consulting with Dr. Google, I can usually find a workaround that can act as a quick fix, but these issues can often reoccur, corrupt documents and create frustration.

In my experience, most of the time, if not all the time, having a simplified and robust template being used from the very start of the bid can solve the majority of these issues.

But most of the time, if not all the time, templates aren’t created to be simple or robust and bid teams aren’t informed on how to use them correctly.

A perfect template will have a comprehensive number of styles aligned with the client's font and size specifications. Our standard Tender Plus template has styles that can be easily modified to reflect our client’s branding, look and feel, with several headings, bullets, and table-specific text to name a few. A consistent table design will be set up along with sturdy headers and footers that sit within a sensible margin.

Ideally, these are set up correctly at the very start of the bid. Too often we come across a template that requires significant edits well into the tender period and it can be extremely tedious to go in and make changes to all documentation.

Once documents go live, it can be a hard ask to get those contributing to documents to use the specified styles – though it shouldn’t be. Using a Word template properly can make contributors' and bid coordinators' lives so much easier, and I would recommend giving a quick tutorial at kick-off on how the templates should be used effectively.

Stress to those who are reluctant to use the template as asked that manual edits are usually the culprit when it comes to corrupted documents, and the time, energy and frustration of fixing these sometimes minor problems cannot be understated. Something as simple as hitting backspace to remove a bullet point style creates a new manual style that later on down the line can conflict with the existing bullet style or, in extreme cases, completely break a document.

Having a structured template means if styles go get out of whack, you can efficiently reapply and fix them. Without a template, you would otherwise need to tediously manually delete or modify conflicting styles one by one, which – having done so on many occasions – can take a lot of willpower to do.

It’s well worth investing time into creating a structured base template that can be customised to each and every bid, and, while it may take some time to set up, it is well worth doing in the long run.

Yours faithfully,

The Word Wizard

P.S. The image for this post utilises Photoshop AI. I don’t get around in wizard garb in the office, but perhaps I should …