Templates

Templates are Word documents (.docx) that contain placeholder tokens. When you generate a document, Missing Toolkit: Templates replaces those tokens with live data from your connected data source.

Missing Toolkit: Templates can also design templates for you — no Word document needed. See Designed Templates.

Uploading a template

1. Navigate to Templates in the sidebar
2. Click Upload Template
3. Provide a name and optionally a description
4. Select your .docx file
5. Click Upload

Missing Toolkit: Templates automatically scans your template and detects all ${PLACEHOLDER}tokens. You can see the detected placeholders on the template detail page.

Creating a template

Use Microsoft Word. Other editors can save a .docx, but Word fills in details — fonts, spacing, image formats — that other tools leave out, and those details are what keep your PDF looking like your template. Templates built elsewhere may convert differently than they appear on screen.

Insert placeholders anywhere in your document using the ${PLACEHOLDER_NAME}syntax. For example:

Placeholders are case-sensitive and use UPPER_CASE with underscores.

Line items table

For line items, place the ${LINE_ITEMS}placeholder in your template. Missing Toolkit: Templates will generate a table with columns for Description, Quantity, Rate, and Amount.

Tip: If you place ${LINE_ITEMS}inside a styled table in your Word document, Missing Toolkit: Templates will preserve your table's formatting (borders, colors, column widths) and apply it to the generated table. If the placeholder is in a plain paragraph, a default table style is used.

Managing templates

On the Templates page you can:

• View a template to see its detected placeholders
• Download the original template file
• Delete a template you no longer need

Tips for best results

• Use simple formatting in your templates — bold, italic, font sizes, and colors all carry through
• Avoid placing placeholders inside text boxes or headers/footers (use the main document body)
• Test with a single entity first to verify your layout before generating in bulk

Missing Toolkit: Templates checks each template when you upload it and flags anything that may not convert cleanly, so you don't have to know these details in advance.

Fonts and PDF output

When Missing Toolkit: Templates produces a PDF, it draws your document without the fonts installed on your computer, so a font we don't have is replaced with the closest one we do. Most replacements are exact and your layout is untouched. A few are not.

Use one of these and your PDF will match your Word document:

Aptos (Word's default), Calibri, Cambria, Segoe UI, Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, Courier New, Helvetica.

These come out slightly larger, which can crowd a fixed-height table row or push the last few lines onto an extra page:

Georgia, Garamond, Franklin Gothic, Tahoma, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Corbel, Book Antiqua, Palatino.

Missing Toolkit: Templates tells you at upload if your template uses one, so you don't have to check this list.

The reliable fix: embed your fonts

If you want a PDF that matches your Word document exactly — whatever fonts you used — embed the fonts in the template. Your fonts then travel inside the file, and we draw with those rather than a substitute.

• Windows: File → Options → Save → Embed fonts in the file
• Mac: Word → Preferences → Save → Embed fonts in the file

Tick Embed only the characters used to keep the file small, then save and upload the template again. This is worth doing for any template you send to customers.

Two other things that shift a PDF

• Text boxes don't always convert the way they look in Word. Put anything that must appear in the PDF in the body of the document or in a table.
• Tables wider than the page. Word quietly shrinks a table that overhangs the margin; a PDF converter may not. If a table looks like it reaches past the right margin in Word, drag it back inside.

Word output is unaffected by any of this — a .docx opens in your own Word with your own fonts, exactly as you built it.