Make Office Publisher 2007 Templates Your Own

Office Publisher 2007 includes a range of coordinated templates that reflect different types, color schemes, and personalities. The template styles are coordinated so that you can choose a style for your newsletter (the Arrows style, for example) and choose the same style (Arrows) for your business cards.

Customizing Your Brand Elements

When you select a template you want to work with in the Getting Started window, the panel on the right displays a preview of the selected template as well as the Customize and Options boxes (see Figure 7-4). You’ll use these two items to tailor the template to reflect your brand elements.

What’s in a Brand? The message and values your business communicates—what sticks most in your customers’ and prospective customers’ minds—are your brand. You might have a well-known product name that communicates dependability, integrity, and trust. You might have established your organization as the one that “puts people first”—and so your brand communicates caring and respect of staff and customers. The way in which you communicate your brand has a lot to do with how your customers remember it. Even small items—such as the font you choose, the subtle color of blue you always use, or the company motto you’ve had since the ′60s—all reinforce your brand message. Choosing colors, fonts and phrasing that reinforce the brand you want your customers to remember is an important part of telling the story of your business or organization. If you choose well and use your items consistently, your publications can go a long way toward helping your customers understand who you are and what you offer—which can mean increased customer loyalty and greater visibility down the road.

Selecting the Color Scheme

Office Publisher 2007 includes dozens of professionally designed color schemes for your publications. This saves you the trouble of trying to determine what colors match as you prepare your business materials. To make a color scheme the default for the publications you create in Publisher, click the Color Scheme down arrow in the Customize box and select your choice (see Figure 7-5).

Choosing a Font Scheme

The font scheme you select for your publication includes not simply one font in a particular style and size but instead two complementary styles—one for headings and one for the body text of your materials. Each scheme has its own name (such as Deckle, Dictation, and Economy, as shown in Figure 7-6). To choose a font scheme, click the Font Scheme down arrow and scroll through the list to find and click the one you like.

Using Your Business Information

Office Publisher 2007 provides several ways to add your business information, such as the firm’s telephone number or motto, to your customized template so that you don’t have to retype it each time you create a new document. In the Business Information section of the Customize dialog box, you can add and display the information easily. Begin the process by clicking the Business Information down arrow and choosing Create New (see Figure 7-7).

The Create New Business Information Set dialog box (see Figure 7-8) gathers the information so that it can be applied automatically in your publications. Fill in the information and name the set by clicking in the Business Information Set Name (the name you enter will be available in the Business Information list in the Customize box).

Applying Business Information Your business information will be applied automatically to a new publication you create whenever you choose the information set in the Business Information list. The information is plugged into any business address fields (for example, in a return address text block on your company newsletter). You can also add specific items from your business information set by displaying the Business Information task pane (choose Business Information from the Insert menu or click the task pane title bar down arrow and choose Business Information). You can edit the business information you’ve entered for a specific set by choosing Business Information from the Edit menu (or click the Change Business Information link in the bottom of the Business Information task pane). The Business Information dialog box enables you to choose the set of information you want to edit and then make modifications, delete, or update the data as needed.

Save and Categorize Your Customized Template

After you choose the Customize and Options settings for the new template and click Create, the new publication is displayed in the Office Publisher 2007 window. This is a good time to save the publication as a template if you know you will be working with this publication type regularly.

You can easily create your own template based on your current choices by choosing Save As from the File menu. In the Save As dialog box, click the Save As Type down arrow in the Save As dialog box and choose Publisher Template. Assign a category to the template (for example, Brochure) by clicking the Change button and typing a word or phrase for the category and clicking OK.

Now you can use the saved template when you begin a new publication by clicking the My Templates item in the Office Publisher 2007 opening window.