Holiday Greetings!

Make your own greeting card using Publisher and impress family and friends with your thoughtfulness and your savvy designing skills. Not only will you save money, but your card will be unique, unlike the impersonal sentiments in a prewritten greeting card.

Here’s how:

Open Publisher. Under Publication Types, click Greeting Cards and choose the Holiday category. A variety of design templates for different holidays will be available for you to choose from. Scroll through the pre-designed greeting card templates. Click on any design template to preview a larger image. The preview panel on the right also offers some customizing options giving you the option to modify certain design elements right away. Once you have the design template you want, double-click the card template or click on the template and then click Create.
The design template that you have selected will open and you can start inserting your own text and pictures. The Format Publication Task Pane, on the left, offers abundant choices of Color Schemes and Font Schemes for you to choose from. Just click on a color scheme or font scheme and it will replace the existing color/font scheme of your publication.
To view the inside or the back of your card, click on a page number in the page sorter at the bottom left of the screen. Even though the numbered tabs are labeled pages, the greeting cards will print on one side of an eight and a half by eleven size paper. Once printed, you can then fold the page into quarter pages or in half, depending on the design template you have chosen.

All the templates are set up with text boxes also known as placeholders. To insert your own text, just click inside a text box and type: the selected text will be replaced with your own words. To replace a picture in the existing text box: From the menu bar, click on Insert, then Picture and choose either Clip Art or From File. If you are adding a new picture follow the same steps: Insert>Picture>Clip Art. The difference when inserting a new picture where none existed before is that now you will have to reposition and resize the picture.

You can also use the Objects toolbar on the extreme left of your Publisher screen to insert an empty picture frame, pictures, text boxes and various shapes.
It’s easy to start with a pre-designed template and then customize the card with your own text and pictures and tailor it to fit your specifications. Once you finish creating the card, make sure to print it on paper that is specifically designed for greeting cards since the package will usually include envelopes.

- Rina B.