Postcards & Greetings Cards – Using Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word® is not the most sophisticated design tool on the market, but most people in business and at home have some idea how to use it. Happily, it has most of the features useful for doing some basic good design – let’s put together a personalised mailer for low cost holidays using Word!

Open the A5 template in Word. Make sure that you are in Page Layout view. You should see two pages, the front and back of your postcard.

START WITH A GOOD IMAGE

We’ll start with the FRONT of the card, where most of the important information needs to be.

If you have a background image, lay that down first. Select the Text Box tool and draw a rectangle, starting at the top left, finishing bottom right.

Once your text box fills the whole of the front, double click within it to bring up the “Format Text Box” dialogue box. In the first tab, change the fill colour to “No Fill” and the Line colour to “No Line”.

Before closing the box we must also remove the default margins, so go to the Text Box tab and make all the Internal margins “0”. Click “OK”.

The whole front now should be white and clicking in the text box will show a blinking cursor in the top left corner.