Creating and modifying pages with many rich graphical elements, such as photos, has always been something Publisher is great at. In the new Office, we did a lot of work to make working with pictures even easier, and help you keep all the photos you’re working with organized from start to finish, making it easier to get the exact page layout you want.

new additions to Publisher 2010 is the advanced OpenType typography capability. It enables you to add ligatures, stylistic and contextual alternates, swashes, and numbering styles.  If you're unfamiliar with typographic terms, take a look at this Beginners Guide to OpenType before we examine some of these features.

One of the ongoing sources of confusion among Publisher users is how we use the terms page and sheet. Simply put, the page is the content of your publication and the sheet is the sheet of paper on which the page is printed. Depending on what you're creating, you may fit several pages on one sheet, or potential a page may extend across several sheets.

For example, if you're creating a holiday card, each page will be 4.25"x 5.5". Four pages will be printed onto 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper and then folded in quarters to make the card.

Over a year ago, my manager, Louis, wondered aloud what Help would look like if it were written by famous authors. The concept tickled my fancy and I wrote a couple of parodies of famous authors writing Publisher Help content. I love this idea, so I'm going to publish these parodies and ask you all to make suggestions in the comments of other authors who might make good Help writers, or even better to write your own parodies in the comments. So here we go.....

Crop marks, also known as trim marks, are lines printed in the corners of your publication's sheet or sheets of paper to show the printer where to trim the paper. They are used by commercial printers for creating bleeds where an image or color on the page needs to extend all the way to the edge of the paper. Printers generally can't actually print to the very edge of the paper, so instead they print on a larger sheet of paper and then trim it down to the correct size. Crop marks are used to define where to trim. So, to print crop marks, you must print on a paper size that is larger than the page size you have set for your publication.

Valentine's Day is today! If you're reading this, perhaps you forgot to get your sweetie a card. Publisher can help you. We've got 12 built-in Valentine's Day card templates that install with Publisher and another five online templates that you can use to quickly produce a card in time to give to your sweetheart by the end of the day!  Be sure to check out the Valentine images available on Office.com to help you create a unique card.

Watermarks are text or pictures that appear behind document text or that appear on pictures or other images to show copyright. You can use text, WordArt, pictures, even clip art. Pretty much anything can be used as a watermark.

Information is often much easier for readers to consume when it's in a table--no, not restaurant tables--tabular rows and columns. For example, check out how much easier this list of products and prices is to follow when it's in a simple table. First the list:

Rhododendron: $15/foot; Vine Maple: $5/foot; Japanese Maple: $10/foot; Dogwood (white): $12/foot; Dogwood (pink): $15/foot; Sub-Alpine Fir: $18/foot; Deodara Cedar: $20/foot.

And now the same information in a simple table: 

 Scenario-Focused Engineering is how we are approaching designing the next version of Office. The goal is to make the experience of using Office revolve around what you, our customers, do with the applications; to do our best to design through your eyes. This extends right down to writing Help; we plan to deliver scenario-based Help in the next version of Office.

In thinking about this, I wondered what kind of scenario writing most appeals to people using Publisher and Office generally. In the past we've tended to use scenarios in writing fairly technical IT deployment Help, such as these business intelligence scenarios, or these SharePoint 2003 scenarios, or roadmap articles like this one for SharePoint 2007 that wraps a set of articles into a coherent organization. For the Information Worker audience we've produced some scenario-based videos, such as the Office Intervention series. And I've put together a roadmap style article on manipulating images in Publisher 2010, but we haven't had a consistent philosophy about scenarios and Help.

So, my question to you is, what do you want from scenario-based Help?

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.