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)