How to build a meeting minutes template?

This article provides a step-by-step guide on designing your own meeting minutes template, tailored to your organization's branding and the specific details you wish to include. The same instructions can be applied to creating templates in both Word and PowerPoint.

General rules when building your own template

• Templates are built using binding elements that reference specific data attributes.
• Curly brackets are used to identify binding elements.
• For extracting data, the data must be detailed in a table format (the binding elements need to be divided in a table to pull each item's data
• The table must have a header row and the first cell of this row must specify the binding element of the object you want to retrieve the data for. For instance, for the table to pull all meeting content (actions, decisions, agenda items etc), the first cell of the table needs to start with the {@Actions} binding element. The @ symbol is used to represent the iteration through all items.

Steps to follow for building the template:

• Identify the binding elements for which data you require for reporting
• Outline a table and insert each binding element in different columns. You will also need to separate the tables to accommodate the different sections of the meeting data that is extracted (example, you will have 2 separate tables to extract the meeting session details and meeting session content).

Understanding Binding Elements

The table below lists the binding elements that can be used to retrieve the meeting information.

1. Meeting session details

2. Meeting members properties

3. Meeting Content properties

Building the template

When creating a table to export the meeting items, i.e meeting agenda, notes, actions and decisions,

• the first cell of the header column must start with {@Actions} to indicate that the table should return meeting items.
• [SubRow] element needs to be added to indicate that the item's assignee and response need to be returned.
• the columns containing the assignee names, status and response must be consecutive and the cells need to be split in two rows.
  • the order of these columns does not matter but the fist column must indicate how many columns are used to return assignee data. In the above example, [SplitRow=1] indicates that the next column is used to export the assignee name of the agenda, action and decision assignees. If you decided to return the assignee name and status, then you would need to specify [SplitRow=2].
  • finally, {} on the second row indicates where rows will be inserted in the case of multiple assignees. This final step only applies for Word Templates.

Now let's look at how to build a template by using the binding elements from the Understanding Binding Elements section. The following example displays how the tables are built to return the meeting details, meeting content - a linked actions/decision, due date and who it is assigned to. 

The tables in this template represent meeting details and their binding elements (strings in curly brackets):

• Table 1 - the binding elements to extract the meeting's details, extracting the location, date and time. 
• Table 2 - the binding elements to extract the meeting session's description along with the attendee/meeting member details (the invited and attended member details only)
• Table 3 (the minutes) - the binding elements to extract the meeting session's agenda, notes, actions and decisions (indicated by the first cell binding element {@Actions}, due date and assignee details (the assignee's name)

The image below shows an example exported using the above template.

Below attached are examples of meeting minute templates (both Word & PowerPoint templates) to help guide you to create your template.