Halloween is a little more than a week away so it's time to decorate the porch for your Trick-or-Treaters, or perhaps a Halloween party. Try using Publisher and Office.com's library of images like these: The first thing to do is decide how big you want your decorations. Do you want small bats to tape to the windows? Or a big skeleton to hang on the door? This will help you decide how big a sheet of paper you need and whether you can print at home or if you need to take your skeleton door hanging...

I love the catalog merge feature in Publisher . It's a powerful tool to help small businesses create catalogs of their products and services quickly and cheaply. The bonus is that the catalog merge feature isn't just for catalogs; you can use it to make directories as well. Let me give you an example. For instance, let's say I'm a small Information Technology company creating a proposal for a potential client. In addition to the details of the proposal, I also want to add listings for each of the...

To date, we've published five parodies of famous authors writing Publisher Help articles: Tom Clancy - Major Tamilla Kortovna shows us how to create place cards in a war zone using Publisher 2010's Mail Merge. Raymond Chandler - An LA private eye comes to Seattle to help an old flame use catalog merge before her ne'er do well husband gets home. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - The Colonel gets help from his son Ruiz to create a bleed for printing posters that then turn to butterflies. William Shakespeare...

This month's Publisher web roundup includes a Web cast on creating marketing materials, a short review of the history of Publisher, tips for creating greeting cards and to use and configure the "nudge" distance, and a set of brochure, flyer and newsletter templates.

 As always, if you know of a great Publisher tip, story, or post that we didn't list here, please post a comment below.

...

The cropping tool got a significant upgrade in Publisher 2010 with the ability to pan your image inside the crop window. First, a couple of definitions to be sure that I'm being clear:

• Crop: To trim vertical or horizontal edges of an object. Pictures are often cropped to focus attention on a particular area.
• Pan: To move the image around in the cropping window. This helps you to focus the attention on a particular area by moving the image.

Let me show you how this can work to help you get the most from your images.

...

Publisher is a great tool for creating and printing business cards, address labels, name tags. Here's five tips to help you print your cards, labels, or tags with a minimum amount of time and frustration.

...

Calendars are always a hot search term for Publisher users. You want to create yearly calendars, school calendars, insert calendars into newsletters, and put calendars on business cards. Here's how you can do all those things.

...

Greeting cards offer an excellent way to reconnect with old friends and thank loyal customers. You can send cards for birthdays, to congratulate a client, or just to let friends or colleagues know you're thinking of them.

Publisher has lots of greeting card templates, from Valentine's Day to thank-you cards. To help you create cards you'll be happy to send out, here are five quick tips for Publisher 2007, and of course the concepts work for Publisher 2010 as well:

...

Oh yeah, the NFL pre-season is over, the college season started last weekend, and the NFL season starts tomorrow when the New Orleans Saints travel to Green Bay to play the champion Packers. No doubt you'll want to have a party tomorrow or maybe this weekend. Office can help.

...

At the end of July I asked you in a poll what author you'd like to see next in my "Famous Authors Write Help" series. Jane Austen was the winner with 50% of the vote.

So, here's my take on Jane Austen explaining the difference between printing multiple copies and printing multiple pages.

...