letterhead - Create your own letterhead

If you use a letterhead for business or personal correspondence, you're probably familiar with the cumbersome drill of sheet-feeding single pages of preprinted letterhead into your printer. Or maybe you take the approach of placing just the right number of letterhead sheets into your printer's paper hopper and hoping you don't miscount, misfeed, or make a mistake.

In either case, there's an easier way. If you use Microsoft Word as your word processor, you can type your correspondence into a letterhead template within Word and then print your letter complete with logo and info on plain paper. Here's how to create a Word letterhead template.

Plan your letterhead
If you're going to design a letterhead from scratch, the first step is to decide what information you want to include. Name, address, and zip code are minimum. You may also want to include a phone number, fax number, and e-mail address. If you already have a letterhead or are starting with an example you like, chances are good that you can re-create it within Word.

Choose a graphic
Most business letterheads include a picture or logo, and yours should, too. You can scan an image from hard copy, create a logo using a drawing program, import a logo from a clip-art collection, or download an image or graphic file from the Internet. If you scan your graphic, scan it at 300 dots per inch. If you're creating or importing a graphic, try a test document and ensure that the graphic is sized correctly and that you like the way it looks when it's printed.

The best source for a logo image is a clip-art collection such as Corel Gallery 2. Not only do you get thousands of images to choose from, but you don't have to worry about copyright issues. Exporting an image from Gallery 2 is simple: Select the image you want on-screen and export it (File/Export) as a bitmap file to your Word directory.

Convert to black and white
Even if you have a color printer, you'll save print time and disk space if you use a black-and-white logo rather than a color one. If the graphic you've chosen is in color, use a program such as Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to convert it to black and white. If you're set on using color, you can use these same applications to minimize file size by converting the image to one that uses fewer colors: A 256-color picture file is one-third the size of an equivalent 24-bit file. Because the logo will be included in every letter document you create, you don't want it to take up a lot of space.

Enter your text
Now you're ready to work with Word to put your design on the screen and page. Open a blank Word document. Next select Header and Footer from the View menu. Now type in the header text you want to appear at the top of your letterhead page. Don't worry about formatting-we'll make it look good in a later step. Click on Switch Between Header and Footer to enter text in the footer. (You can leave either the header or the footer blank.)

If you want page numbering or date and time stamps on your pages, this the place to accomplish that. Position the cursor in your document and click on the appropriate icon in the Header and Footer bar.

Insert your graphic
To insert your graphic, select Picture from Word's Insert menu. Browse until you find the folder where the logo is located, and then select the image file. Once you have the image, you can move it around within the header or footer for final positioning by clicking on the image and dragging it. You can also resize your image by grabbing one of its corners.

Polish your letterhead
To give you letterhead a professional appearance, take advantage of Word's ability to control font size, character attributes, and character spacing. If your text is looking a bit cramped, expanded character spacing will give it a more professional look and feel.

To expand the spacing, highlight the text you want to modify and select Font from the Format menu. Now click on the Character Spacing tab, select Expanded from the Spacing item, and then increase the character spacing in 0.1-point increments until you like how the text looks. You can also adjust the position of the text, lowering or raising it to suit your design.

Create a template
Once you're satisfied with the way your letterhead looks, you need to save it as a Word document template. From the File menu, select the Save As window, and use the list under the down arrow to change the Save As type from a Word document to a document template. Then give your template a logical name, such as Letterhead.dot.

When you change to the file type to document template, Word brings up the contents of your Template folder. Select the Letters & Faxes folder from the window and click on OK. (Earlier versions of Word differ in how they create templates. Consult your documentation.)

Use your letterhead
To use your new letterhead, go to the File menu and select New. In the New window, the folders in your Template folder will appear as tabs. To load your letterhead, select the Letters & Faxes tab, and then double-click on the Letterhead.dot icon. Now you can simply type, print, and save your letter in the usual way.

As long as you don't modify the header or footer, your letterhead will print on every page of your document. If you want your letterhead on the first page only, create a Section End anywhere on your first page. Do this by selecting Break from the Insert menu. Then choose the Next Page button from the Section Breaks, and click on OK. Now just delete the header and footer text and graphics from the second page of your document.