Understanding what makes up templates
When you start a new model, you never really start with a new file. Any time you click New in the File menu or click on the Simple template in the Welcome to SketchUp window, you are opening a template. In fact, it would be fair to say that there is no such thing as an empty SketchUp model. If you have the SketchUp modeling screen up on your computer, even if there is no geometry, axis, or background colors, you are looking at the contents of a SketchUp file.
To dive right into this, that is all a template really is: a SketchUp file. When you start a new file, you are telling SketchUp to open up an existing SketchUp file. The difference between starting a new file via a template and using the Open command to open a file is that when you use a template, SketchUp knows that you do not want to save anything back to the template and prompts you to save it into a new file.
While clicking New from the File menu may seem to land you in a brand...