Back in May I posted about using the Pack and Go wizard for professional printing. In that post I didn't talk about the option to just create a PDF. These days commercial printers really prefer that you just send them a PDF, rather than the .PUB file and associated graphics and fonts. I called several commercial printers in Seattle and asked them what their preferred digital format was and they all said that while they can use .PUB files there are sometimes issues with layout and fonts that can be avoided by saving your publication as a PDF and sending them that.

I've now written four parodies of famous authors writting Publisher Help articles:

• Tom Clancy
• Raymond Chandler
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• William Shakespeare

The Marquez and Shakespeare parodies are in response to reader suggestions, Shakespeare was the winner of a poll where Hemingway and Parker tied for second. These parodies are challenging and a lot of fun to write so I'm asking you all again to let me know what famous writer you'd most like to write a Publisher Help article.  This poll will be open for the next week and then I'll announce the "winning" author! And as always, please feel free to log in and suggest authors in the comments if you've got an idea that is not one of the poll selections.

You or your colleagues, friends, or family are probably pretty comfortable using Word to create nicely formatted text documents. This video shows you how you can create a newsletter in Publisher 2010, but use Word to create the text for the newsletter. This way you and your newsletter contributors can write in the comfort of Word and then quickly import the Word documents into your Publisher newsletter.

-- Bob deLaubenfels

In March I published a post on adding a TOC  to your Publisher 2010 publications. Here now is a video demo showing how you can do this.

Back in April I wrote a short post about adding watermarks to photos with publisher. This three and half minute video shows you how to create and save a copyright watermark to use to copyright images.

-- Bob deLaubenfels

Publisher and HP's cloud publishing site MagCloud are partnering to make using Publisher with MagCloud an easy solution to create, print, and distribute your publications. This video walks you through the process for creating a catalog in Publisher 2010 to MagCloud's specifications and then uploading the catalog to MagCloud for distribution though printing and shipping, and through free digital downloads.

At the beginning of the month I asked you in a poll what author you'd like to see next in my  "Famous Authors Write Help" series. William Shakespeare was the winner with 42% of the vote, with Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway each getting 17%.

Other posts in the Famous Authors Write Help series:

Tom Clancy
Raymond Chandler
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Now, here's my take on Will Shakespeare writing Help for catalog merge.

My son is graduating from high school in a week, and on Monday he came home with his high school yearbook. It was amazing to see all the "little kids" we once knew grown up to young adults, and it reminded me that this would be the perfect time write a blog post about using Publisher and MagCloud to create, sell, print, and deliver yearbooks of all kinds.

*A quick reminder about MagCloud: Hewlett Packard's cloud publishing site, called MagCloud, is an excellent resource for any on-demand publishing scenario. Microsoft and HP have partnered to make using Publisher with MagCloud an easy solution for publishing catalogs, magazines, newsletters, and yes, yearbooks. You can read more about the Microsoft/MagCloud partnership and receive a 25% discount coupon code in my earlier post.

So far I've published three parodies of famous authors writing Publisher Help articles:

• Tom Clancy
• Raymond Chandler
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I really enjoy doing these, and you all seem to enjoy them also, based on page views and comments. So today I'm polling you to pick my next author. This poll will be open for the next week and then I'll announce the "winning" author! And as always, please feel free to log in and suggest authors in the comments if you've got an idea that is not one of the poll selections.

Hewlett Packard has a cloud publishing site, called MagCloud, that's great for on-demand publishing of magazines (thus the name MagCloud), but it's also an excellent resource for any on-demand publishing scenario. Microsoft and HP have partnered to make using Publisher with MagCloud an easy solution for publishing catalogs, magazines, newsletters, or even yearbooks. In a future post I'll walk through using Publisher and MagCloud to publish and sell high school yearbooks, so here's a basic overview of how Publisher and MagCloud work together.