Well, Microsoft Publisher is a great tool for small businesses, community groups, and families who want to create publications without investing a lot of time and money in buying, learning, and supporting heavy-weight desktop publishing applications. With Publisher you can create things as simple as greeting cards or labels, or as complex as yearbooks or catalogs.

Publisher has the tools you need so that you can layout, crop, and format images in your publication. You can layout your text and make it flow around images, from text-box to text-box, and with Publisher 2010 you can use some exciting typographic fonts to really make your publication sing, but more on that in a post later this month.

So, how can you get started learning about Publisher?

January is the biggest month for starting wedding planning. It's time to start thinking about sending out Save-the-dates or even invitations. Publisher is a great resource for the Do-It-Yourself couple, offering a variety of templates to help you get started publishing Save-the-Dates and invitations now, wedding programs for your big day, and even a photo album to preserve the memories.

The job market is tough right now. There are lots of people out there looking for work, so if you're one of them, it's crucial that you get your resume noticed. One way to do this is by making use of graphics instead of just text. While Publisher is your best Office app for building graphics-heavy resumes, our Publisher resume templates tend to use graphics for decoration. What if you want to really stand out by using the graphics AS your resume? What am I talking about? Well, here are a couple of examples from Randy Krum's excellent blog Cool Infographics:

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

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.

In a previous post I asked you how you wanted Help workflows delivered. Did you want a story? A roadmap of links to step-by-step instructions? A video of the process? A training course? Thirty-six people responded and 42% said that video was their preferred method.

Today I'd like to get your input on what you like about Help videos.

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.

Much, maybe most, of what we do in Publisher is designing and laying out our publications. Aligning text boxes, pictures, borders, and clip art to make a pleasing and compelling presentation. The tools for laying out your publication are margins, guides, and align. Today I'm going to talk about margins and guides.

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.

One of the ways that Publisher can help small business owners is with creating and printing personalized business cards. As always, start with our large collection of free business card templates. Use the business information set feature in Publisher 2007 and 2010 to automagically populate your business card with your company name, address, contact information, logo, etc.

So here's a collection of help resources to make sure you get your business cards created and printed just the way you want.