In addition to Jean-Guy's advice, if you saved your template in the correct
folder, you can close out your template, click "File", "New", select
"General templates" from the Taskpane (or click the "General" TAB if using
Word 2000 or 97) and your template should be there. If you select your
template, it should create a new document based on the template. Easiest
way to ensure is that if you open a document based on the template, the blue
Title bar should say "Document1 - Microsoft Word" instead of the actual
template file name.
The trick to making sure this is the default action is when you clicked
"General templates" and the dialog box opened, check out the bottom right to
make sure the "Create New" setting is set to "Document" and not "Template".
Good Luck!