How to do Tasks in Publisher 2010

Publisher 2010 Tasks

Create Mail Merge

Mail merge is the ability to create a mass mailing based on a single document template. That means you can create a letter in Publisher and have it addressed to every recipient in your address book, or any other list of contacts. You may have seen this feature in action if you've ever gotten a political mailer with your name on it instead of the generic "Dear Voter" or "Dear Recipient."

The first thing you need to do before you begin a mail merge document is acquire a recipient database. You may already have this if you keep all of your contacts in Outlook or some other email client. You can also create your own in a database program like Excel.

Mail Merge may seem like a complicated process to set up, but Publisher provides a wizard to help us do so as painlessly as possible. Let's launch the wizard and we'll walk you through the steps.

Find the Mail Merge button, go to the Mailings tab. Mail Merge is on the far left edge of the ribbon.

Clicking bottom of the Mail Merge button and then select Step by Step Mail Merge Wizard. This opens a pane to the right of our document.

At the top of this pane, Publisher gives us a quick overview of how Mail Merge works. It tells you that the first step is to create or acquire a recipient list, which we already discussed. The second step is to design your document with mail merge fields, and the third is to create a merged publication. We're going to walk you through each of these steps. We'll start with creating or choosing a recipient list.

The second section of step 1 of the Mail Merge wizard asks us to create a recipient list. It gives us three options to choose from.

We can:

Use an existing list. These are usually created in some kind of database program like Excel.
Use the names and addresses in an Outlook Contacts folder.
Or Create a new list.

Clicking Use an existing list, opens up a window where you can navigate to the location on your computer where the list is stored.

If we were to select our contacts from Outlook, we'd check that box (as in the illustration above) then advance to the next step of the Mail Merge wizard.

Publisher automatically searches our Outlook folders to find contacts. It then shows us the available lists, and the number of contacts contained in it. This is illustrated in the example above. There is only one folder containing recipients in our Contacts account (40.) Select the account you'd like to use then click OK. This opens another window.

Here we can review the recipient list, and choose the ones we'd like to include. Unchecking a box by a contact name excludes that contact from the list. Click OK when finished.

Now let's create our own custom list. Returning to the first screen of the Mail Merge wizard, we will select the Type a new list button and click Next.

Here we can create and edit contact information. To add a new entry, click the New Entry button. You can even customize column names that will be available when we create our document. When you are finished adding names, click OK.

Now that we've created a recipient list, we're ready to move on to the next step of the wizard. Click Next: Prepare your publication.

This is what the next step looks like:

The fields in the large box that dominates the example above are essentially placeholders. What you are going to do is drag those fields to the place in your document where you want the corresponding recipient information to appear. For example, if you were writing an informal letter, you might want to drag the First Name field to the Dear location in the document. That way, when you've created your mail merge document, a recipient's first name will appear there. The first name field inserted into your document may look like this:

You can easily configure and add commonly used functions such as address blocks and greeting lines. Let's take a look at that process.

Click Greeting line in the More Items section of the Mail Merge wizard.

Here you can choose a greeting, a greeting line format, and select the greeting line for "invalid" recipient names. Invalid recipient names might be those contacts for which a first or last name wasn't included in the list. You can also click through your contacts to preview them. In the example shown, we're looking at a preview for contact 3. You can use the Match Fields button to choose the correct field of your recipient database to show.

Click OK when finished.

When you're done creating your document, click Next: Create merged publications. This is the last step of the Mail Merge wizard. Publisher has essentially created a new document for each of the recipients in your contact list. If you had seven contacts, Publisher created seven documents. If you had 27, it created that many documents. The great thing though, is that Publisher doesn't have to save all of those documents, taking up valuable disk space. Instead, there really is only one document with all the data fields inserted into it.

Here we can choose to print the documents, preview them before printing, merge them into a new publication, and more.

To preview the documents to be printed, and perhaps double-check that all of our recipients' information was correctly inserted into our document, click the Print preview button.

After you've done this a few times, and are familiar with the steps and procedures, you can skip the Mail Merge wizard and use the buttons in the ribbon. They work identically to what we saw in the wizard, just without the explanation for each.

E-mail merge works identically to mail merge, except when you're finished, instead of printing options, you're given email options:

Create labels

Publisher doesn't have a label button like Microsoft Word that automates the process. Instead, you have to create the labels, just as you'd create any document. You do, however, have a lot of templates to choose from that work well with Mail Merge.

To create a new document based on a label template, or to create your own, go to File and select new. To see the available label sizes or templates, click the labels button.

You can choose from a variety of label templates or you can choose your own. The page size of most labels can be found, including the kind made by Avery, Formtec, and 3M/Post-it. Be sure to select the size that matches your labels. If you don't, the label will not print correctly.

Once a label is open, you can use the Mail Merge functions we mentioned above to create your labels.

Want to learn more? Take an online course in MS Publisher 2010.

Insert External Files

If you have a long text file you'd like to insert into your document, without copying and pasting, you can go to Insert File button, which can be found on the Insert tab.

When you click this button, Publisher automatically opens a Select Text File window that allows you to navigate to the file on your computer.

Select the text file, then click OK.

Publisher automatically inserts all of the text into your document, adding pages, and threading text boxes as necessary. You can then move and edit each of these text boxes the way you'd edit any other text box, as well as the text inside of them.

Manage Embedded Fonts When creating a document in Publisher, you can only use the fonts that are installed on your computer. Further complicating issues, is the fact that if you open a document that uses a font that isn't installed on your computer, a different font will be substituted. This can seriously impact the aesthetic design of your document.

To prevent this issue, Publisher gives you the opportunity to embed the fonts you used in a document, directly into the document file. This means that no matter what computer you open the document on, those fonts will be available.

There are a few caveats to this. The first is that you can only embed TrueType fonts. The second is that you can only embed the fonts for which this is allowed by its licensing agreement.

To include embedded fonts into your document, go to the File tab, click Commercial Print Settings, and select Manage Embedded Fonts from the drop down menu.

This opens a new window that contains a list of all the fonts used in the current document. In the example below, there are three fonts listed. Check the Embed TrueType fonts when saving publication to embed these fonts. You can also choose whether or not to embed common system fonts and whether you want to include subset fonts, such as italics or bold.

Now look at the License Restrictions column. This tells us that only one of the fonts we used can be embedded into our document.

For the fonts you don't want to embed in the document, you can click on its name then click Don't Embed in the bottom right corner. (In the example below, only the button Embed can be seen, though it is opaque. In this case, you will have to click on an embeddable font to activate the Don't Embed button.) Click OK when finished.

Edit Business Information

To view and edit the Business Information that will be included, and associated with, your document, go to the File tab. This isn't a recipient's information, this is the document creator's information. Yours, in other words.

Click the Edit Business Information button.

To edit the information, simply click into any field and begin typing. You can even add a logo. Clicking the Add Logo button allows you to navigate to an image file on your computer. Click Save when finished.

Publishing

In the past, "publishing" meant delivering your document to a production company and having it printed and bound. The world has changed a lot since then. We have infinitely more options.

With fast, high resolution printers, "publishing" a document can be as easy as sending it to your printer, and binding it by hand. Many office supply stores sell saddle-staplers and comb binders. Saddle staplers allow you to fold pages and staple them in the middle, just like a magazine. Comb binders don't require any folding. The comb-binding machine punches a series of oblong holes along one edge of the paper and then rolls a plastic comb binder into it to hold the pages together. Many companies use these methods to print manuals and presentations that are going to be used within the company.

The term "publishing" has also expanded to include electronic methods of delivery. For instance, an email flyer, web advertisements, and e-books.

In many cases, you will probably want to publish the same document in a variety of different formats. In this section, we'll introduce you to the tools Publisher provides that make doing this easy and intuitive.

Save & Send

All of the features we're going to talk about in this section can be found on the File tab in the Save & Send section, so please take a minute to familiarize yourself with this screen.

Send as Email At some point in your life, you've probably attached a document to an email message and sent it to a friend or family member. That's all Publisher does, really, except you don't have to save the file first, then close out Publisher, then launch your email client, then create a new message, then click "Attach File" and navigate to the document on your computer, then fill out an address, etc. Publisher skips over all that, and attaches the document to an email message automatically.

Take another look at the Save & Send example above. Here we can see what options are available to us when sending a document through email. We can decide to send just the currently selected page, all pages, the entire document as an attachment, the entire document as a PDF, or as an XPS document.

PDF and XPS formats are basically electronic representations of your physical document. They were designed to exactly replicate it across different computer platforms. When created correctly, the document that you send to your printer is identical to the document your boss views on his computer.

For our example, we are going to select the Send All Pages button.

Publisher may need a few moments to convert the file into an email, especially if it's a long, complicated document.

As you can see in this example, an Outlook-like email message opens up with your document as the body of the email. You can enter an address into the To field, insert a subject, and then click send. If you have multiple email accounts, you can choose which account to send the message from with the Accounts button.

It's that simple. The recipient will receive a message with the pages of your document in the body of the message.

If you click the Send as Attachment button, Publisher will tell you that the document must save and close first before it can continue.

Click Yes to continue. If this is the first time the document has been saved, the Save As dialogue window will open. Specify a title for the file, then click OK.

Publisher will then automatically open your email client with the document attached to it. Simply enter an address, enter a subject and a personal note, and then send it just like you would any other email message.

Clicking the Send as PDF and the Send as XPS buttons automatically opens and attaches the file to a new email.

Use the Email Preview button to see what your document will look like when received by the recipient.

Publish to Web

One of the great features of Publisher is that you don't necessarily have to know HTML to create an attractive web page. Instead, it converts your document to HTML for you. All you have to do is design it.

To use this feature, go to the File tab and select Save and Send. To the right, go down to File Types and find the Publish HTML button.

Publisher can handle HTML content in one of two ways. As Web Page (HTML), which is pretty much how most HTML documents are published to the web. This method creates the basic HTML file with location information for all of the objects on the page, but the objects themselves are placed into a supporting file folder.

The second method creates a Single File Web Page (MHTML) in which all of the objects and images are embedded on the page and no supporting file folder is created.

To select which method you'd like to use click the tiny arrow to the right of Web Page (HTML). Below you can see the two options and a description for each. Click on whichever one you want. In the example below, we've selected Web Page (HTML).

When you have selected a method, you can then specify some other options by clicking "Advanced Options." The Advanced Options window looks like this:

You can choose how you want Publisher to save the file, the Encoding values, and whether to email the entire publication as a single JPEG image. Click OK when finished.

When you are ready, click the Publish HTML button.

Publisher will then ask you where to save the file. Choose a location and click Save.

Pack and Go

The Pack and Go section is where you go when you're completely finished with a document and want to send it to a commercial printer. Here you will get to select how big of a file to create (largest file = highest quality, of course), whether to create a .pub file format or a PDF file format or both, and more.

Like we said at the beginning of this section, the Pack and Go export options can be found on the File tab, in the Save & Send section.

To specify the file size/quality of the file, click Commercial Press. (In all fairness, it doesn't really look like a button, but it does have a tiny arrow to the right of it.) You'll see this:

As you can see, Publisher gives a brief explanation for each option, so there's no point repeating them here.

If you are in doubt about which option to choose, check with your commercial printer.

The Custom button allows you to tweak the settings and get the best compromise between file size and document quality.

Now let's look at the next button. Here we can have Publisher create a PDF file and a Publisher file, or just a PDF or Publisher file.

Check with your commercial printer to see which files to send. Offset printing plates are typically made with PDF but the printer may want the Publisher files (.pub) to make small color corrections or something of that nature.

When you are satisfied with your settings, click the Pack and Go Wizard button.

Upon clicking this button, you will be asked where you want the files to be sent.

You can decide to burn the files to disc (a blank disc will need to be inserted into the disc drive), a removable storage device (such as a flash-based thumb-drive), a floppy disk (do they even make these anymore?) or some other location on your computer. Select a location, then click Next.

Publisher will work for a minute (length of time depends on size of the file) then tell you that the process is complete.

Save Files for Another Computer You can use the Pack and Go Wizard to save files for another computer, too. The screens you will see are slightly different than when you send a file to a commercial printer.

Let's try it out and discuss the differences.

When you first click the Wizard, you will see this screen:

It basically tells you what the Wizard will do. Click Next.The next screen is identical to the one we saw when saving files for a commercial printer. Select a location, then click Next.

Here you can choose to include fonts and graphics. Make your selections, then click Next.

This screen is simply informational. Click Finish to compress and save your document.

Create a Template A template is just a document that has already been designed and can be opened and edited without altering the original. Creating a document template in Publisher is as easy as clicking the Save As button and selecting "Publisher Template" in the Save As Type box.

If you were not otherwise aware of it, Microsoft Office Live gives Office users access to a professionally created templates, as well as templates created by individual users.

To upload your own templates to this community, go to the File tab and select the Save & Send section. At the bottom of the list, you'll find a button called "Share with Template Community" as illustrated in the example below. Click the Share button to upload your document as a community template.

Color Models If you are a casual Publisher user, designing simple documents for the web or to be run off on your printer at home, you probably won't even need to think about color models.

Color models are used by commercial printers in an attempt to reproduce precisely on a piece of paper the colors you see on your computer monitor.

Before we continue, we need to clarify a few terms.

RGB--stands for Red Green and Blue. These are the colors that your computer monitors (and most home printers) use to create every color and hue in the spectrum.
CMYK--Stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (Black.) This is also called "process" or "four color."
Single Color--Uses one color ink. Images are reproduced in half tones.
Spot Color--an additional color in the single-pass offset printing process. These colors are usually added if the usual four process (CMYK) colors don't adequately, and faithfully, reproduce a color. The colors typically added are orange and green.

To manage color models in Publisher, go to the File tab, then the Info section. Click the Commercial Print Settings button, as illustrated below.

A new window will open.

From here, you can define the color model. You can choose RGB, single color, process, spot, and process plus spot. You can even create new colors.

If your document is going to viewed primarily on the web, you will probably want to use RGB, but if you're going to use a commercial printer, CMYK might be a better option.