Susan,
You are looking at the wrong drop-down. The one you are looking at only selects live, dated agendas, not templates.
Lets see if we can get you clear on how this works...
1. There are two "flavors" of agendas, live dated agendas, and undated, named agendas, the latter of which we refer to as "agenda templates". There are also two types of selection drop-downs: one for the dated agendas, and one for the named templates. The "live" dated agendas are what you actually use in your meetings. The named templates are just a labor savings feature.
- There are also two plus buttons, one in the agenda toolbar used by the VPE/admin to create live, dated agendas, and one in the admin console templates editor for creating new templates there.
2. Usually, most clubs will create templates as a consistent starting place for creating the dated agendas to save them time in creating agendas. They do this because the layout of their agendas do not vary much from one meeting to the next. So... creating a template saves time since you just select the named template when you create your dated agenda and a copy of the named template is used as the dated agenda. Once the copy is made by the system to create the dated agenda, the association between the two is forgotten (no linkage is kept), and the newly created dated agenda can be used or modified as needed without affecting the template used as the starting place.
3. So, essentially, a named template only defines a layout for a dated agenda, and that is its main purpose. It allows you to save that layout and use it as the starting place for creating the dated agenda.
4. Where this can get a bit confusing is that you can also use a past dated agenda as a "template" for creating a new dated agenda. Essentially, you do not have to use the named templates at all, if you do not wish to do so. However, I do recommend proactively creating at least some templates, and they are easy to create since you can save any dated agenda as a named template.
5. How the process typically works is that a club will:
- Determine if they have several agenda layouts that would be useful to save as templates for later use in creating dated agendas. (For example, "Normal Meeting", "Fall Speech Contest", "Spring Speech Contest", and "Speech Marathon".)
- If they do need to save several agenda layouts, they will typically either create the live dated agendas and save them as named templates OR they will use the template editor in the admin console to create the templates directly.
- If they only use the same agenda layout all the time, the club may opt not to create named templates, and just use the last dated agenda as a "template" to create future agendas. Some clubs do this, never touch the template editor, and the system gives them that flexibility.
6. Typically, named templates are created by the Admin or VPE. You can give the VPE access to the templates editor via the Access Settings tab in the admin console.