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Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For business | Windows
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
I don't think you'll find any definitive statement of the order of those changes.
As a matter of efficiency, there are just a few things I can recommend.
Start with the page size, orientation, and margins because those can affect the values you'll want for paragraph settings and some styles. Doing it in that order avoids having to revisit the paragraph settings after changing the page settings.
The next task should be defining or modifying the styles you want. Carefully define the "based on" properties so the chain of property inheritance works properly. The paragraph settings aren't a separate step; they're part of the definition of each style, or inherited from another style. See https://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/howstylescascade.html . If you plan to use numbered or bulleted heading, use the procedure described at https://shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/numbering20072010.html .
The appearance of a document's table of contents is determined by the definitions of the styles named TOC 1, TOC 2, etc. The appearance of the heading at the top of the table is determined by the style TOC Heading. If you use either of the "Automatic" items in the References > Table of Contents menu, the wording of the heading is predefined but can be edited. The "Custom" TOC doesn't include a heading, so you have to supply the wording for each document -- it isn't a property of the template.
The appearance of the header and footer are similarly defined by styles, named (surprisingly?) Header and Footer. Define or modify these styles like any other.
Font installation is not a template issue; rather, whatever fonts are installed in Windows are (with some exceptions) available in Word, and the font name, size, color etc. are defined in each style.
Word templates don't have a setting for the default file options that you mentioned. If you want to set these to something other than Microsoft's choices, you'll need a macro to do it. A macro with the special name AutoNew stored in the template will execute automatically each time a new document is created from the template.