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Author: jacobhylen

content/arduino-cloud/06.features/13.custom-templates/assets/ISDashboard.png

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+---
+title: Custom Templates
+description: Learn how to use the custom templates feature, allowing you to easily recreate one of your existing projects, either for yourself or for sharing with the community.
+author: Jacob Hylén
+tags: [Arduino Cloud, templates]
+---
+
+The **Custom Templates** feature is a part of the Arduino Cloud that allows you to create your own custom cloud templates, letting you configure a project complete with a Thing, Dashboard, and Triggers with a step by setup wizard guiding you through the process. 
+
+With the Custom Templates feature, you can choose any of your existing cloud projects and walk through the process of turning it into a template within a few minutes. You can save it for you to use yourself, or export it as a `.tino` file to be shared with other people however you want. 
+
+## Hardware & Software Needed
+To follow this guide, you will need:
+- An Arduino Cloud compatible board
+- An Arduino Cloud Project to turn into a template
+
+## Create Your Project
+First - we need our starting point. You may already have used the Arduino Cloud to create a project, if so you can go ahead with what you have already made. 
+
+For the purposes of this guide, we'll use an example project that displays one of a few icons on the LED Matrix of an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi that you can choose from a selector widget. 
+
+![Icon Selector](./assets/ISDashboard.png)
+
+## Creating the Template
+Now that we have a project that we want to turn into a template, let's get started. 
+
+Go to the landing page of [Arduino Cloud](app.arduino.cc). In the sidebar to the left, find the button that says **Templates**. 
+
+![Templates](./assets/cloudinterfacetemplates.png)
+
+Click into this page, and you should see that at the top there are two tabs, labelled "**Your Templates**" and "**Arduino Templates**", make sure you are in the one labelled "**Your Templates**". This is the tab that contains all the custom templates you've either made before or imported from a `.tino` file. 
+
+Click Create in the top right, then Choose "New Template". 
+
+![New Template](./assets/newtemplate.png)
+ 
+### Selecting a Thing
+Now you should be taken to a new screen, where you add your Iot assets. Let's start with the Thing.
+
+Click "Thing" on the right side of the screen. 
+![Choose thing](./assets/selectingThing.png)
+
+Then search for the Thing that you want to add to your template. "Icon Selector" in the case of this guide. Click your Thing, then "Add to Template".
+
+
+### Selecting a Dashboard
+Now do the same for the Dashboard. 
+
+You may see a small prompt suggesting you to add a dashboard that was already associated with the Thing you're creating the template around, you can use this as a shortcut if you want to. Otherwise follow the same flow as for selecting your Thing.
+
+### Additional Documentation
+Now you may want to add a little bit more documentation for your project, such as a short description or images of schematics, wiring diagrams, and such. For the Icon Selector project there is no external circuit built around the board, so we're just going to write a small description, as such:
+
+![Additional Documentation](./assets/description.png)
+
+Once you've completed your template, click "Generate Template" and you're fininshed!
+
+## Exporting Your Template
+Once you're back on the Templates page, you can export the `.tino` file to be used by others by clicking the three dots on the side, and clicking "download (.tino)". This will start downloading the file that you can share with the community to let others recreate your project.
+
+## Conclusion
+In this article we've gone over how to use the **Custom Templates** feature of the Arduino Cloud to generate our own Cloud Templates that we and others can use to quickly recreate several instances of the same project.