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joe_mcguire

255 Posts

12139

March 31st, 2006 15:00

Gettiing a Letterhead into Word

Question 1: Is there a (relatively) pain-free way to get my firm's printed letterhead into Word? There is no way we know of to create the letterhead in Word and have it reasonably resemble the letterhead due to the fonts and some pretty simple graphics. We tried. The result stinks. At present I use a Word template to create letters in Word but have to print them on thep re-printed letterhead. I would like to be able to print the letter on plain paper and have it look like it was printed on the letterhead, or at least a good photocopy of it. Or take the Word letter directly into Acrobat so I can e-mail it without first printing it on letterhead and then running it through my scanner.

Question 2: If the answer to Question 1 is Yes, signing the letters would be a nice touch. Is there a good way to insert a signature into my Word letter electronically?

Thanks!

lydthekid

165 Posts

March 31st, 2006 16:00

Joe,
1) It might take some tinkering, but I can think of one way that might work. You could scan the letterhead as a graphic and insert it into a new document. Then save that as your new letterhead template.

2) To add the signature would be a similar operation. Scan the signature you wish and save it as a separate graphics file (I have mine as a jpg file). Then insert that file into your letter in the appropriate place.

Lydia

michael66

7 Posts

April 4th, 2006 14:00

Relatively pain-free and letterhead does not equal each other, however I'm sure it is possible.  We have preprinted letterhead at our company, however sometimes we want electronic.  We use the electronic letterhead and insert a .jpg signature and then convert the document to .pdf.  This makes a much smaller file than a scanned image, especially if you have color involved.
At our company we have used the header and footer to insert the different aspects of our letterhead.  It takes a little time (I think It took me ~2 hours to match our letterhead), however we inserted our color logo and typed the address and phone numbers into the header, we also have some text in the footer.  When you use the header and footer areas the data will go across multiple pages and is separate from the general body of the letter.
On inserted signatures, I have found .jpg works best and with my signature I had to lighten it up so the printer would not print a darkened area around the signature.  The lightening can be done while scanning the signature or directly in Word by double clicking the image, which will give you tools to adjust the image.  Also the image does not have to be very big.  I think my signature file is at 80 dpi and a file size of 30k.

joe_mcguire

255 Posts

April 4th, 2006 20:00

Sounds great. How did you get the parts of your printed letterhead into the Word Header/Footer? Our letterhead consists of a simple graphic with the firm name at the top, names of 7-8 lawyers running down the left margin and the addresses of our two offices at the bottom.

michael66

7 Posts

April 5th, 2006 01:00

I'm working with Office 2003, I assume it would be similar in the last couple of versions.  To get to the header and footer area go to menu View | Header and Footer.  This will make dotted lines show for the header and footer areas.  The easiest way I have found to insert items in the header (graphics, address, phone, fax) is to create a table in the header.  Go to menu Table | Insert | table; a table usually based on one row and two or three columns.  Then you will need to turn the lines of the table off and insert your text and graphics.  You will need to adjust the size of the table.  You can do so by placing your cursor over the line of the table, the cursor icon will change, then click and drag the table to where you want.  Sounds a little complicated now I have typed it down, however it does work.  You just have to be patient when laying everything out.  The above works for the header and footer.  Once you have put something into the header or footer you can edit them by just double clicking and then to get back to the body of the letter, double click on the body area.

The left margin thing is a little difficult, however I believe it could be accomplished with a table sized to run the names down the left side and the body of your text on the right.  This way can be a little quirky if you are used to using the Tab key, as the Tab key works differently in a table.

joe_mcguire

255 Posts

April 5th, 2006 04:00

Creating the headers/footers is OK. What I am trying to figure out is how to get our printed letterhead into the header/footer. Are you scanning the letterhead? If so, are you saving the parts as bmp files and then inserting them? PDF? (Somebody actually tried to recreate our letterhead by typing it into the header/footer but the result was terrible: sizes, fonts, graphics were lousy and unprofessional.)

michael66

7 Posts

April 5th, 2006 14:00

I'm surprised by the quality issue.  I've created our company's letterhead in headers and footers and quality was not an issue.  It does take some time to match font sizing and work out all the spacing issues, however the final result has been as good as our preprinted letterhead.  Did you get the sample I e-mailed you?  At any rate, if you scan the top of your letterhead you should be able to insert it into the header.  I would use .jpg as the file to keep the size down.  You should be able to insert the .jpg image directly into the header or footer.  Once you have the header area open and the cursor is in the header area, go to menu Insert | Picture | From File... and browse and select your scanned image.  You may have to do some resizing. 

joe_mcguire

255 Posts

April 5th, 2006 18:00

Thanks. I got your sample. I was trying to send you ours, but suddenly I am having scanner trouble (I was going to send the Word version that we made up along with a scanned copy oof the actual letterhead). The mainproblem would seem to be the fonts--they are not fonts we have available to us. In the meantime I have asked the firm that prints our letterhead to help me figure out how to do this. I expect they have already addressed this issue. I'll keep you posted.

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