How to create a template for your business letters

How to create a template for your business letters

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): First of all, there is a correction to note. In
my article last week on Canon's photo printer BJC-8200, I wrote
"It would be too much of a hassle to replace the print head with
the scanner head and calibrate the printer again and again."

Datascrip, Canon's distributor, sent me a friendly reminder
and informed me that, according to their technical support, we
need to do the calibration only once, i.e., when the printer was
first used. Afterwards, we no longer have to repeat the tedious
process even though we use the printer for scanning and printing
alternately. Both you and Canon deserve an apology from me for my
misleading statement.

Anyway, this time I would like to leave behind all the techie
stuff on enterprise management, ERP, SCM, ASP, photo printers,
etc., and share some very practical hints with you, especially to
the timid Winword users. Hopefully, after reading this article,
you will no longer have to order expensive preprinted letterheads
for your business from your print shop. You should be able to
print them right from your printer.

Despite the fact that the Internet has enabled a small
business to look like a Fortune 1000 company, once in a while a
hard copy of your business letter is still needed.

A business letter needs a letterhead, which shows the
company's name, address and phone number. Since we are now living
in the Internet era, our letterhead would not be complete without
our e-mail address. A company logo can also be part of the
standard company letterhead. The accompanying picture shows a
simple letterhead for John Smith.

You can create a letterhead in Winword and then save it as a
document template so that you can use it again and again. You can
give it an easily recognizable name such as JS Letterhead, and
Winword usually places it in the designated folder for its
templates. When you want to use it, just create a new document
and you will see the new template's icon on the list of available
templates.

Header and Footer

To create the letterhead template, let us start with a blank
new document. Let us first work on the top part of the template,
the actual letterhead. This part is called the Header. To add
anything on a page header, we need to make the header accessible.
Click on View, and when the menu list appears click on the Header
and Footer menu item.

Start typing the name, address and all other information you
want to appear on the left side of the header. To move to the
right side, place the cursor at the end of the text on the left
and hit the Tab key twice. That will push the cursor to the far
right of the page, and anything you type will appear on the left
of the cursor. That's the secret.

If the text does not go all the way to the right--as shown in
the accompanying picture, you'll have to manually move the Tab
stop to the right. It's easy, just place the cursor as shown in
the picture, press and hold the left mouse button and drag it to
the right until it reaches the right margin border.

To make the header look nicer, you can mix and match the fonts
and their sizes. For example, in the illustration I used the bold
Times New Roman for the name and the regular Arial Narrow font
for the rest. The name can have a 10-point size font, while the
rest has the 9-point size, for instance.

Under the last line of text in the header we can also add a
straight horizontal line to mark the border between the header
and the body of the letter. To do this, press Ctrl-End first to
ensure that the cursor is on the bottom of the header, hit Enter
once, then click on Format and then on Borders and Shading.

Remember that you can choose the thickness of the line and
even its color. Then, on the right section of the Borders and
Shading dialog box, click the icon that shows a line underneath a
paragraph of text.

Now that the header is already constructed, you can click on
the icon in the tool bar that will take you to the bottom part of
the document, which is called the footer. We can include the page
number in the footer.

Hit the Tab key just once to place the cursor exactly in the
center of the page, and then click on the Insert Page Number icon
that you can find on the Header and Footer toolbar.

You can even create a footer that shows the page number and
the total number of pages in the document. To do this, click on
the Insert Page Number icon, hit the spacebar once and type in
of, hit the spacebar again and then click on the Insert Number of
Pages icon just to the right of the Insert Page Number icon. Your
footer will read "1 of 1".

A final step to complete the letterhead template is to add the
date field. With a field like this on the document template,
Winword will automatically add the date to it and use the format
that you've chosen. Hit Enter once to move the cursor one line
down, and click on Insert, and then Field.

When the Field dialog box appears, click on Date as shown in
the illustration. You can choose a date style from the available
list. Just click on the Options button on the bottom left of the
dialog box, and you can make your choice. As shown in the
illustration, I chose the MMMM d, yyyy, and this gave me "June
16, 2000". I didn't have to type it myself.

The next step is to save the document as the JS Letterhead
document template. When saving it, click on the arrow on the
right end of the Save as type: field and choose Document Template
as the format for the document. And, folks, that's really all to
it. Easy, isn't it? (zatni@cbn.net.id)