Annette Gordon-Reed & Peter S. Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (W.W. Norton & Co. 2016).
In information technology, a boilerplate is a unit of writing that can be reused over and over without change. By extension, the idea is sometimes applied to reusable programming as in boilerplate code. The term derives from steel manufacturing, where boilerplate is steel rolled into large plates for use in steam boilers.
A template is a Microsoft Excel workbook with content and formatting that you use as a model to create other similar workbooks. You set options and enter data in a template, and then when you base new workbooks on the template, the new workbooks receive the same settings and initially contain the same data.