The powerful writing and notes app Craft makes wrangling text, images, video and code as easy as drag-and-drop. But you don’t have to start from scratch: its varied and versatile templates give you a head start in making professional-looking documents – without the need for design chops.

Choose from personal documents like a recipe collection or reading journal, family documents such as a travel planner or gift tracker, or meeting agendas, job postings and release notes for your business. You can also create your own templates for frequently used layouts.

Here’s how to get started:

Craft includes more than 25 templates that let you get right to writing. To create a document from a template, click the plus sign button in the toolbar and choose Templates, then pick your favourite.

Each template contains multiple modular elements – text, images, subtitles, tables – along with handy instructions on how to get the most out of the document. Each has been designed as a package, so you don’t have to worry about picking the right fonts or perfecting a layout.

After creating a document from a template, toggle the right-hand sidebar to customise it (without affecting the template itself). Tweak each element, add your own images or use one of the included Page Style presets for just the right look. Craft even gives you one-click access to stock images from Unsplash in case you can’t find the perfect photo in your own library.

If you’ve spent time designing a report or journal you plan to use repeatedly, turn it into a template by dragging the document into My Templates in the sidebar – the template now shows up under My Templates in the Templates Gallery.

As with any other template, you can modify documents created from it to change images, fonts, text blocks and other elements.

The Template Gallery always shows your custom templates at the top, with the built-in ones below. If you know the name of a template you want to use, type it into the Search field to filter the list.

You can also create templates for sections of documents and easily add those sections on the fly. For example, make a template that includes your bio or company background, and whenever you need to include that info in a document, just drop it in instead of re-typing it.

To add a template within a document, simply type “/template” and press Return, then choose the template you want to insert.

Pro tip: typing “/” provides quick access to many other useful Craft commands!