delete a template from My Templates

This is something the iWork designers never gave much thought to. Then when Lion came along it became even more difficult. Your custom templates are stored with other, obscure, User Account files.

You first need to access your User Library folder. Open a Finder window, hold down the Option key and click on the Go menu on the Finder menu line. When the menu drops down, continue to hold down the Option key and select "Library". This is your User Library, distinct from the System Library.

In the User Library, navigate to: Application Support, iWork, Pages, Templates, My Templates.

Good luck.

Jerry

Hi there, I went to the library using finder, option key, library etc to "my templates"... and all of my templates are not there. I found some of them , but the Pages ink/quill icon shows multiple other templates in the window. Where can I find these ones? I tried HD-User-Name and there was no library. I am going batty.

Click on the Desktop so that you see Finder as the active application. Then hold down the Option/alt key & click on the Go menu to find your user library - first screenshot. Once in the Library, view it in column view & follow the path in my second screenshot. I have added extra folders for organizing that you won't have, but the "My Templates" folder you need is highlighted in the screenshot.

I had the same issue, and decided to make a video tutorial so if you need help or advise please watch the video, many people have found it really helpful 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y56yQyCnXgw&list=UU9QzafPF_JPq1jS_LZdYS8w

Watch in 1080p too

Hope it helps guys and that you resolve it in minutes.

Kind Regards

James

It is about MS Word Templates, not Pages. might work the same though.

You know, I tried this but when I get to the 'Microsoft' folder there's no 'Office' folder. There are four folders within my Microsoft folder, which are MAU2.0, MERP2.0, Playready and Silverlight - and none of them have My Templates in them! It's weird because I don't even have a 'Library' menu when I click on 'Go' via the Finder (although I can get to the Library by clicking through the hierarchies). I'm currently running Yosemite 10.10.1 and using Office for Mac through 365. I wonder if this has anything to do with it?

Anyone else having the same problem as me? I can't believe I'm not able to delete this template that I myself created!

Hi Tamsin,

You need to hold Option then click "Go" and Library will come up and its in there.

There should be a way of making this stay visible somehow for people who use and alter the Library files.

Cheers HyperDoc

I made 4 custom TEMPLATES in numbers (VER. 3.5.2(2118) . I added them to the TEMPLATE CHOOSER. Now i want to delete 2 of them, so I took the pathway to MY TEMPLATES in application support But they are not there. The do show in on the desktop under (MY TEMPLATES) but not in the MY TEMPLATES FOLDER?

I don’t know where to go from here?

Hi Nick and others,

In Pages 5 (and Numbers 3) you can delete a Custom Template from Template Chooser.

Menu > File > New From Template Chooser > My Templates.

Right click (or control click) on the template you want to delete (or rename)

Regards,

Ian.

Right click on the template/s in your Template Chooser and delete.

The advice above is for the older versions of Pages and Numbers.

Ptere

I was rapidly approaching my own 3-step solution: (1) Unplug all cords. (2) Drop machine in nearest dumpster. (3) Buy a PC.

This is one of many productivity issues with Apple. Simple things that should only take a few clicks of the mouse are instead complicated and cumbersome. Many thanks to those users who contribute solutions that could never be found in Help.

In the User Guide for Pages '09 (the version about which Peggy was talking) it wasn't very difficult to find this page:

Nor was it difficult in the Help for Pages 5 to find this:

If these solutions, which are in the Help, could "never be found," it's probably because very little effort was devoted to finding them.

But Jeff, no body reads manuals, or takes advantage of the Help menu… 😁

Three years after this Post the solution worked for me, thankyou. Iwas trying to delete old and confusing templates in iWorks 9 on a system now running with Yosemite.

Getting a little tired of Apples now relentless actions to force (not just encourage) users to upgrade, migrate and spend more, constantly, just to do simple stuff. RAnt Over.

Hi,

Anyone still looking for where Pages 5.5.3 stores user templates needs to navigate to the "Container" folder in the Library. From there, in this instance, you find the "com.apple.iWork.Pages" file and then right click to open a menu from which you choose "show package contents". Inside there is a folder named "Data." Open this, open "Library," open "Application Support," and there you will find "User Templates."

With any luck the user templates that have been saved in Pages 5.5.3 will be there.

I'm not sure why Yosemite or the latest version of iWork applications (whichever is responsible) makes it so hard to find files like these.

The obvious other thing you can do is what I did to find them - do a search of the top Library folder for the name of one of my templates. But of course you would need to know this. I suppose you could always save a user template in Pages with a distinctive name to search for.

Ordinarily of course most user template functions can be done in the chooser as has already been described. But I too needed to move old templates to their proper place when changing from Pages '09 to 5.5.3

I hope thjis helps those looking for these files. 🙂

Tim