I have a question about saving Layout templates. I have made a couple of templates for Layout and saved them so that when I am prompted to “choose a template” when opening layout, they show up in the “My Templates” tab. The issue I am running into is that when I selected one of my templates and being working on a project, I inadvertently end up saving over my template. My question is if I am possibly saving my template incorrectly so that when I save my Layout project it prompts me to save it as a new file or if I just need to remember to “save as” whenever starting a new project.
If you are using Save as template for your project you would create a new template. You should not be able to save over an existing template at least if it is saved in the default location. On Windows that location is in a normally hidden User/AppData folder.
Thanks Dave,
So I checked to make sure I used the “Save as template” option and they did save in the hidden AppData folder. When I open one of those custom templates in Layout and make changes to it, then click the “save” button, it saves over the template and now if I were to open that template again I would have to undo the work that was done on it previously. What I would like to see is a similar process like when I open a premade layout template. When I am working on one of those templates and I click the save button, Layout opens explorer for me to choose a file destination. So I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong on my end or if this is the same for everybody.
First question is did you install Sketchp and LayOut correctly? That requires right clicking on the downloaded installer and selecting Run as administrator.
When you open a new file selecting your template it should open with the tab showing Untitled. See my screen shot.
If you were to save this you should be prompted to provide a file name name. Even if you click on Save as template you should be prompted to provide a file name.
If you use the same name as the template you should be asked if you want to overwrite the existing template.
What do you see when you open your template? What do you get when you choose Save?
In the past when I would open up the template it would not be an “untitled” file name, rather it would have the file name of whatever I named the template. Although I deleted those templates and started from scratch and followed the process you showed here and it it seemed to work. Now when I open the template it comes in as a an untitled file and when I click save it prompts to choose a save location. I feel like I followed this same process in the past but I must have been doing something wrong. Thank your time and help! It must have just been a mistake on my end somewhere.
Something is odd about the way you did it before but I’m glad it’s working now.
Is it possible that instead of opening an actual template you were chosing a file from the recently opened files? If you had saved your template as just a LayOut file to, perhaps, your Documents folder, it would show up in the lower part of the Welcome screen. It would look like your template but it would open with the template’s file name.
FWIW, keep track of that Templates folder. When it is time to update to a new version of SketchUp/LayOut you can copy the contents of that folder to the equivalent location in the new version’s Templates folder and be done with it.
As I have been thinking about it, I think what I was doing was creating the template, then started immediately working on the template without closing it. I noticed when I create the template, the file name goes from “untitled” to whatever I named the template. Then once I close out of the template and open it back up, the file name is “untitled”. So I think I must have not been closing the template after creating it, thus when I would click the save button, it was saving over the template.
Templates don’t need to be saved as a “Template” inside SU. You can simply create your own template folder wherever you want. Save all your standard templates there. Then you simply open the file you want and save as, or copy the entire folder into your project folder and go!
