How to Use a Template Outside From the Default Templates Folder in Microsoft Word

If you’ve created (or received) some templates and saved them in a different folder other than the Word’s default custom-template folder (Documents\Custom Office Templates) then Microsoft Word won’t show your templates when you click File tab > New > Personal link. You can use Windows shortcuts to tell Word where your templates are:

To add a template to the Personal templates list, put a shortcut to the template in your user templates folder (Documents\Custom Office Templates).
To add a folder of templates that will appear in the Personal templates link, put a shortcut to the folder in your user templates folder. See following example figure:

The More Template.lnk is the folder shortcut in Documents\Custom Office Templates. actual folder location is on D:\ drive.
The template2 is file shortcut in Documents\Custom Office Templates, actual template is on the desktop.
The fast-tutorials template is in the default template folder (Documents\Custom Office Templates).

You can create a document directly from a template. Open a Windows Explorer window to the folder that contains the template, and then double-click the template. (The default action in Windows for a Word template is to create a new document based on it, not to open the template. To open the template, right-click it and choose Open.)

Note: For this tutorial, Microsoft Office 2019 has been used.

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