My company is sending out a monthly newsletter and I want to create a custom MS Word template for them to use.



Ideally, I'd like to make a some background designs in Photoshop or Illustrator and then turn that into a template my coworkers can pull up in Word and start typing their newsletter as usual.

How do I go about this?

Thanks!

Which aspect(s) do you need hep with? Are your background designs intended to be used as a watermark on all pages, or just on particular pages?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Well after the design is created (I assume I'll have to match the measurements of the design to an actual letter size paper), how do I turn it into a template?

There is a design for the first page and last page on the template. An pages inbetween stay blank.

Not sure what watermark means.

To get you started with template creation, see: http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customizat...platePart1.htm

A watermark is a background image that can appear on all pages. If you only want it to appear on the first page, configure your document with a 'different first page' layout before adding the watermark (for which, see Page Layout|Page Background>Watermark). You can achieve much the same result by accessing the header and using Insert|Picture. A different last page will require a 'Next Page' Section break before it. If you create that after inserting the watermark, the last page will inherit it; otherwise, if you unlink the Section header from the previous Section, the last page can have its own watermark.

As for turning a document into a template, you do that via 'Save As' and making the 'type' a template (probably in the dotx format, though you should use a dot format if your colleages using it don't have Office 2007 or later).

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]