Do you get your letterhead professionally printed? Professionally done business cards are probably unavoidable but think about it – these days most correspondence doesn’t even get printed. This means that you probably don’t need to bother with fancy paper or expensive designers, especially if your a firm looking to cut costs. Microsoft Word is powerful when it comes to word processing and the creation of letterhead is no exception. Here are a few tips to get your started.
Consider making the first page or cover sheet of your document a mostly blank page that contains just the name and address of your firm. This adds security and makes your work look polished. If you go this route, you’ll want a different header starting on the second page of your document. After going to Insert > Header, the Different First Page option under the Design Tab is how you’ll achieve this.
Headers don’t need to be at the top of the page. In fact, although the name doesn’t quite fit, you can have a “header” that appears as a column along the left or right margin of your page. Envision your logo and contact information running along the side of the page and your message in the center.
Keep your images looking sharp. By default, Word will want to compress any images you include in your document, which will reduce their quality. However, to maintain the quality of images, you’ll just go to File > Options > Advanced > Image Size and Quality and select the box that says “Do not compress images in file.” Then, from the same page, set your target default output to the maximum dpi in the list.
We encourage you to play around with headers in Word. The program really is getting easier and easier to use while increasing its capabilities. We suspect you’ll find the headers feature in Word to be easy to use and creating your own letterhead could prove time and cost-effective.
