For jobs that involve creating publicity materials on a regular basis, you are likely to be provided with a dedicated desktop publishing package such as Publisher.

When you open Publisher, you are offered a range of publications including news-letters, brochures, greetings cards, flyers (small advertisements) or business cards that you can customise, although you may prefer to start with a new, blank page.

THE BASICS

Publisher is very like PowerPoint or Word – it offers a variety of drawing tools that you can use to add text, pictures or drawn shapes to the page. Click the tool and draw a box (often referred to as a frame) on the page. In some cases e.g. Word Art or Clip Art, the gallery will open automatically but otherwise, type in your text or double-click inside the box to browse for pictures. All added items can be resized, dragged to new positions and formatted to enhance the appearance of your publication. For example, two useful toolbar buttons allow you to increase or decrease the size of the font in steps, so that you can see when the text is just the correct size.

One change from word processing is that your view is often at a very low magnification, so that you can see how the whole page is looking. Change the magnification figure, click a Zoom button or press function key F9 to move in for detailed work.

Pages

At the bottom of the screen, you will see a number in a shaded box. This is the page currently on screen. For brochures, newsletters or leaflets, add extra pages from the Insert menu and click the number to work on that page.

Columns

Within any text box, you can display the contents in columns. Right-click the box and select Format Text Box before clicking the Text Box tab and then click the Columns button. Set the number of columns and increase the space between columns if necessary for a clearer display.

When you return to the publication, you may need to increase the size of the font to fill the space more evenly. If you overdo this, you will see an overflow symbol showing that not all the contents can now be displayed. Either increase the size of the text box or decrease the font again so that all the text fits inside.

Linking text boxes

Instead of typing all the contents of your publications, it is very likely that items will be provided by colleagues as text files. These can be inserted directly into a text box if you open the Insert menu and select Text File.

For publications that spread over several pages, it is common to continue a long item on a later page, and you can control the process by linking text boxes and ‘pouring’ in the extra text.

• 1.Draw your first text box and insert the file. You will see the overflow symbol showing that some of the text does not fit.
• 2.Move to the second page and draw a new text box where you want the item to continue.
• 3.Return to the original box, click it and then click the Create Text Box Link button on the toolbar.
• 4.When you hover over the second text box, your pointer will now display a pitcher . When you click the mouse, the extra text will be poured into the box and a navigation button will appear. Clicking this takes you back to the earlier text.

• 5.For printed publications, you can add extra text at the top or bottom of linked boxes saying ’continued on (or from) page . . .’ by selecting these options from the Format Text Box dialog box.

USING READY-MADE DESIGNS

If you want to create complex publications and base them on designs in the application, you need to select the publication type in the list of designs and then click on your preferred style showing in the main window.

A limited range of options will now be presented to you.

• Publisher allows you to store information about yourself or your organisation that can be extracted and added to any publications you create. To set up the information, click OK when offered the option and complete the various boxes.
  

If you have more than one role in the organisation, create several different businesses and then click Update to store the data.

• When you return to the publication, you can change a limited number of basic design features e.g. colour schemes, font types or layout. Click the relevant underlined text and choose from the list offered in the options pane before previewing the effects.

Adding or amending the contents

From this point, you must replace the contents of your publication manually with the text and graphics you want to include. Click any text currently in place and type over as normal, and add extra text boxes in empty parts of the page. Double-click a picture to open the Search pane and find an alternative from the Clip Art gallery and delete, move or re-colour any drawn shapes such as lines or rectangles.

Printing

Some publications can be folded in different ways, or may need to be printed on specially sized paper or card. You can adjust any of the settings in the File – Page Setup window although you may also be offered some options when creating a publication using a design in the catalogue.