Your Guide to Templating in Displayr

There are a few different mechanisms for templating within Displayr. These are via:

1. The Document's Page Master - creates the Page layouts available, font and color defaults for built-in items, and other design elements.
2. A template document - a document where you can pre-configure the Page Master, default significance testing, default exporting, default captions, and include other pre-built outputs. You can also add this to your template gallery.
3. The built-in templating system - Save, insert, and apply templates via the menu. Can template both individual outputs and groups of outputs, as well as entire Pages. Even variable sets can be templated to modify variables based on another variable. Templates are files stored on the Displayr cloud drive with the data inputs removed. They can be accessed from all documents in your account. Note, items using a template from the cloud aren't automatically changed if the template is changed.
4. A Duplicate/Modify workflow - works with anything; you can also copy and paste from one document to another in your account.
5. An R visualization template - stores font and color settings that can be used with any R-based visualization. Notably, you can assign colors by category name using this feature.
6. The Format painter - for more basic outputs like shapes and text outputs, you can use the format painter to apply settings from the Appearance tab to other outputs.

How to template a Document

To template a document so that you can start with a particular style or settings and more, you will configure what you want on the Page Master and other settings/outputs, and save the document. See How to Create a Template Document. If you'd like to make this template available in your template gallery when starting a new document from scratch, see How to Add Custom Document Templates to the Gallery. You can also Duplicate a document you like a lot (or upload a QPack of one), delete the data sources (or update them if appropriate), and Modify the report to suit your needs.

How to template a Page

The method you need here is dependent on what you want to specifically template on a Page. 

1. If you want to template items on the Page and their specific settings (sans data), create a template file on the cloud drive using right click > Save as Template. With this, you can save groups of items on your page to insert on other pages or save the entire Page, including the items on the Page Master. You can access these templates from any document on your account. See How to Create and Apply a Page Template.
2. If you only want to template the styling, text boxes, or placeholders, you can do this via the Page Master. This is also where you will add combo boxes to your layout to be able to share them across pages in your report.
3. Duplicating and modifying a page is an easy way to create pages from a template, but it may require more modification and is limited to pages in the document(s) you have open. You can also insert a Page into the Report of a template document to have that available to duplicate and modify.

How to template a Visualization

The quickest way to save a visualization with its type and settings (sans data) is to right-click > Save as Template. This works on individual visualizations as well as groups of visualizations, if you want to add those groups to other Pages. These will also be available across documents. This is helpful if you want to edit visualizations at a later time, as you can save a new version of the template and reapply it to your visualizations to update them all at once. See How to Create and Apply a Visualization Template for details.

If you are only concerned with ensuring consistent font and colors across visualizations, any R visualization can be hooked up to an R visualization template (versus the templating system, which is visualization type-specific). This is especially useful when you have brands or categories that you want to have certain colors using named colors. See How to Create an R Visualization Template for more details.

If you only want to reuse the visualization template in a specific document, using duplicate and modify is also a quick and dirty way to reuse a visualization as a template.

How to template a Table

There are built-in table templates via the Appearance > Table style menu in the object inspector . You can select multiple tables at a time and apply the same change to them all at once. You can also change the default table style to use it as a template for new tables and those that haven't been manually changed. You can select headers and cells in a table to format them using the Appearance tab, then copy and Paste > Paste Format to other tables to apply specific formatting customizations. You can also apply table rules that format a table to other tables in the document. 

If your table is R-based, like the Table with Custom Formatting, you can right-click > Save as Template to create similar tables across other documents, see How to Save and Apply a Customized Analysis Output as a Template. However, these tables don't support all features as native built-in tables. 

How to template an analysis output or other R-based Calculation

Any R-based output (whether it is an analysis created via the Displayr menu or a Custom Calculation) can be created into a template. The template will contain the same code and object inspector settings, ready for you to hook it up to new data where it is inserted. This is a great way of sharing custom analysis tools with others on your account and in other documents. You can also configure other outputs, such as regressions, to your company standards or best practices to allow others to easily perform the analysis. All of these tools will be available to insert into any document in your account. See How to Save and Apply a Customized Analysis Output as a Template.

How to template a Variable Set

Variables that are similar can be modified to match each other by making a variable set template. Right-click on the variable set > Save as template. They can be helpful if you have scaled questions that you always recode and combine categories on. See How to Save and Apply a Variable Set Template. 

How to template text boxes and shapes

The duplicate and modify workflow makes it very easy to recreate the same styling. If you'd like to apply a style from one output to other outputs already created, you can use the right-click > Copy Styles feature to use the format painter to apply the same styling to other individual items, see How to Use Format Painter.