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.

If you're planning a New Year's party and you'd like to add some banners to the decorations,  Publisher can do it.

As usual, start with a template, for example this New Year's banner. Last week when I talked about the difference between a page and a sheet I showed how several pages might be imposed (that's publishing jargon for placing pages on sheets of paper) on one printed sheet. With this banner you can see that one page can also extend across several sheets. So printing the banner on 8.5"x11" sheets of paper looks like this in print preview:

Today's post on the reduction in web publication capability in Publisher 2010 comes to us from Jeff Bell. Jeff was the Group Program Manager for Publisher and Text Services during the development and release of Publisher 2010.

For a number of versions, Publisher has filled a gap as an easy-to-use web site authoring tool sitting between the template-based web-hosted offerings and the designer-oriented desktop HTML editors. With Publisher 2010, we sharpened our focus to deliver great experiences and results for print, PDF and XPS, and email output. As part of this focus, we have removed the ability to author new web sites from the Publisher catalog. Here's why...

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.

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.

Here we are just days away from New Year's Day, and that means we need new calendars. As many of you know, Publisher makes quick work of creating personalized calendars. In this post I show how to make a new calendar or update an old one in Publisher 2010 and 2007. (This also works in Publisher 2003.)

The quickest way to start is to find and adapt a calendar template that's close to what you want. You can choose from the 2011 calendar templates for Publisher. However, these templates are written specifically for calendar year 2011 and in a year you won't be able to easily update your 2011 calendar for 2012. If you want to be able to re-use your calendar next year, I suggest that you start with one of the calendar templates that are installed with Publisher. When you open Publisher you are shown a catalog of templates to choose from to create a new publication. The catalog is divided by category, such as Calendars, and whether the templates are installed on your computer or available to be downloaded from Office.com. For calendars, the Office.com templates tend to be designed for specific years, while the Installed Templates are not specific and can be configured for the year or specific months within the year.

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?

Welcome to the Microsoft Publisher blog! On this blog we'll deliver:

• Tips and tricks for getting the most out of Microsoft Publisher, like using the new font typography features in Publisher 2010 or creating/updating calendars.
• The thinking behind some of the development team's decisions, such as the decision to disable some of the Web publishing features.
• Rapid responses on issues and scenarios that you bring to our attention.
• The best Publisher-related writing from around the Web.
• And more as it occurs to us, and as you request it...