Concept: Workbook Templates

Workbook templates enable you to deliver robust data modeling and analysis that maintains the Workday security model. You can define a standardized layout and data model in a workbook, convert the workbook to a template, and distribute that template at scale. Although the most popular reason to use templates is to preserve live data security, templates can also be extremely valuable for workbooks that contain complex formulas.

When you distribute a template to a recipient, and they run the template to create a workbook, the resulting workbook displays Workday data based on the recipient's security permissions.

Workbook templates:

Retain workbook functionality.

Display Workday report data based on the template recipient's report access and data access when they run the template.

Display in Drive like any other item type. A template icon looks like a workbook icon, but it has a T at the bottom right.

The general template workflow steps are to:

(Author/Owner) Convert the workbook to a template.

(Author/Owner) Distribute the template to individuals or groups, or turn on link distribution and give others a link.

(Recipient) Run the template to create a workbook.

After converting a workbook to a template, you can edit the template layout, data model, and so on if needed. Before editing, you must prevent users from running it while it's being edited; to do this, you make it unavailable to run by switching a toggle. When you're done editing, you make it available again so that your template recipients can re-run the template to see your updates.

Considerations for Using Workbook Templates

When you convert a workbook to a template, Worksheets doesn't preserve the original workbook.

When you convert a workbook to a template, Worksheets clears any existing scheduled live data refreshes. (For any templates that you created before functionality changed in February 2024, existing scheduled refreshes will no longer run.)

You can't schedule a live data refresh for a template.

If a live data refresh is currently running in a template, you can't select the

Available to Run

option.

When the template recipient runs a template containing live data to create a workbook, the Workday report runs with the default prompt values from the report definition wherever applicable.

Worksheets doesn't preserve live data note column information in converted templates, even if the template recipient has access to the particular data item; this allows the recipient to enter notes that are most relevant to their specific data instead of the original workbook owner's data.

If the template author protected areas in the workbook before converting it to a template, ownership of those areas transfers to template recipients.

After you distribute a template, any previous workbook schedules are not preserved in resulting workbooks; you need to create a new schedule.

Workday administrators can permanently delete workbooks that are used as the source for templates, and can also permanently delete templates, regardless of whether they have been distributed.

Templates aren't supported for active entry areas; the Convert to Template action isn't selectable.

We recommend not linking from workbook templates to slides presentations. A template isn't intended for use as the direct source of data. Link to workbooks generated from templates instead.