Need Help Creating a Word 2010 Chistmas Letter Template

[Moondoggy]

Can someone please explain how to create a Christmas Letter Template?

I was out on the internet today and found a free Christmas Letter Template but it really wasn't a Word Template it was only a .PNG file that contained a holiday border. If I simply wanted to print this on paper and hand write a holiday letter I wouldn't be posting this thread. What I would like to do is crate a Template in Word 2010 where I open the document and type in the white space inside the holiday border and when I completely fill up the text area on the first page the same blank template would appear on the second page and I would automatically continue typing in the same open white space within the same holiday border. So far, I've been able to set my margins, bring in the .PNG file and expand it fill the whole page area and create a text area in the white space inside the holiday border. The thing I have not figured out is how to get the next page to appear with the same border as the first page. Perhaps it is not possible to do what I want to do or perhaps I'm doing this all wrong or perhaps I just am missing a few steps along the way. Can someone please help me out? Thanks.

 

[macropod]

Cross-posted at: http://www.msofficeforums.com/word/33374-need-help-creating-template-ms-word.html
For cross-posting etiquette, please read: http://www.excelguru.ca/content.php?184

 

[Amy @ German Pearls]

I would write your letter on a blank word document, then use the picture as a background.

In Word 2010 you add a background by going to the page layout menu and going to the page background section. Click on page color and fill effects. Then click picture in the menu that opens. Select picture and upload it. This should carry over to every page of your document.
Amy

 

[Moondoggy]

I would write your letter on a blank word document, then use the picture as a background.

In Word 2010 you add a background by going to the page layout menu and going to the page background section. Click on page color and fill effects. Then click picture in the menu that opens. Select picture and upload it. This should carry over to every page of your document.
Amy

Amy,

Thanks for the reply. I followed what you wrote and inserted the picture as a background and the documents looked great however when I tried to print a sample page to see what it was going to look like, the print preview only displayed a blank page not a page that included the picture I selected as the background. Instead of a picture I tried to set a color as the background and that didn't want to print a blank colored page either. The only thing that worked was to inset the picture as a watermark, scale the watermark to 100% and uncheck the washout checkbox. Afterwards I was able to set the left margin over to the right and the image showed up along with the text aligned to the margin that I set when I printed the document.. Any idea why inserting the image as a background failed while the watermark method did? The image as a background certainly was a bit easier if I can get that method to work. Again, any help will be appreciated.

After sending the above message I figured part of this out. It seems that I didn't have the checkbox "Print background colors and images" checked under File-> Options-> Display. Once I selected that checkbox I could print a full colored background but I'm still having another issue. When I import the image as a background the one copy of the image is displayed as the document background and even when you do a File->Print and look at the print preview it only shows one image as the page background. However when I actually print the page on my HP OfficeJet 8100 it printed multiple small copies of the image (0ver 30 of them) on the page in sort of a wallpaper effect while printing the typed text properly as it was laid out on screen. Any idea how to fix this?

 

[Amy @ German Pearls]

Try this...
Go to File, click options.
When the dialog options click on display and look toward the bottom - under print options. Make sure the background is checked.
Hope that helps.
Amy

 

[Moondoggy]

Try this...
Go to File, click options.
When the dialog options click on display and look toward the bottom - under print options. Make sure the background is checked.
Hope that helps.
Amy

Amy,

That's the check box that I checked and this allowed me to print colored backgrounds and the image does print. The problem now is that instead of printing one image on each page as it's displayed on screen when typing the letter, the printed version shows small images on each page both across the whole width and length of the printed page. As noted in my previous post, when I printed a page it had over 30 images printed on each page.

 

[macropod]

You would have had none of these problems had you downloaded the actual template, as advised in your cross-post on the matter...

 

[Moondoggy]

You would have had none of these problems had you downloaded the actual template..

I believe that your statement above is incorrect. If you read my initial post on this forum site you will note that the so called "template" was only a graphic image in a .PNG format. I've downloaded complete, Microsoft template files before and all you have to do with them is start using them as the image is already imbedded into the template. However, in this case, the so called "Template" was something that you had to import into a Word document and save as a Microsoft template if you want to use it multiple times. This was something I had never done before (i.e. create a template from scratch) and that is why this post was created and why I'm still trying to figure out why, when import the image as a background file, and print the document I get 30 some images tiled across the whole page. If I import the image as a watermark image instead of a background image it prints fine and I'll probably use this technique unless someone can tell me why I'm seeing multiple tiled images instead of a single image as the background.

 

[macropod]

In that case, what you called a template (read your description at MS Office Forums, which is where you first started this discussion) wasn't a template at all. PNG images are not templates. Period.