Your First Template

This walks the whole path once, end to end, so the rest of the help has somewhere to hang. Have a Word document ready — ideally a real one, with the merge fields your firm already uses.

1. Create the template

Open the Templates list at /artifacts and create a new template, uploading your .docx. Kestral stores it as an artifact: a named thing with an owner, a kind, and its own version history.

The upload becomes the template's first draft. Nothing is published yet, and nothing is visible outside your organisation.

2. Read the structure panel

Open the template. Beside the document you will see the structure panel — Kestral's reading of the markup it found: the fields, the conditional and repeating regions, and any references to other documents.

Check this before you change anything. It is the fastest way to find out whether Kestral understood the document the way you meant it. If something in the markup needs attention, the panel says so and names the construct responsible rather than failing quietly.

There is more on this in structure and compatibility.

3. Mark up what is missing

Use the designer to add what the document needs. The Syntaq tab on the ribbon holds the markup commands — inserting a field, wrapping a passage in a condition, marking a section as repeating, referencing another document.

The three parts you will use most:

• Fields — the values that get filled in. See fields.
• Regions — passages that appear only sometimes, or repeat per item. See regions and conditions.
• References — pulling another document in, rather than copying it. See references.

4. Try it with test data

The test data panel lets you supply values and see the document as it would come out. Use it while you work, not at the end — it is much quicker to catch a condition written the wrong way round here than after publishing.

5. Publish

When it is right, publish. That fixes a published version, which is what anyone with access to the template sees. Your subsequent edits go into a new draft and leave the published version alone.

If you need to go back, the version history lets you restore any earlier version. See versions and history.

Before you change a published template

Check who else can reach it. If another firm holds a grant on the template, your change reaches them the moment you publish. See who can reach an artifact.