Ed,

I use that type of template for a lot of my perpetual plaques as well.
Use a piece of Rowmark plastic, using CorelDRAW for alignment, cut out a space for each plate, tape the template to the plaque, position each plate in the appropriate space, drill holes or tape plate down----DONE!
No more mis-aligned plaques and 10 times quicker than manually placing & aligning.
;-)