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...

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:

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I'm about to drive my son to Fresno, California, to start college. Of course I've already bought him a copy of Office 2010 Home & Student. But Home & Student doesn't have Publisher. Ah, fortunately for him and for college students and their parents, there are up grades available from Home & Student to Professional Academic  that offers Publisher, plus Outlook and Access for free! 

Here are the eligibility requirements. In the US, Canada, and Iceland, you have to buy Home & Student between July 1 and September 25^th and redeem the upgrade by October 21^st 2011 (other countries have other eligibility dates). You also have to validate your student status online. You then get a product key for downloading Publisher, Outlook, and Access 2010.

-- Bob deLaubenfels

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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...

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.

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One of the main uses of Publisher is to take publications to commercial printing companies. Publisher makes this super easy with the Pack and Go Wizard. The Pack and Go Wizard creates a compressed file that contains everything that your commercial printer needs.

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When a text box, or AutoShape for that matter, in your publication contains more text than it can display, Publisher stores the extra text in overflow. You can manually move your text out of overflow and back into your publication by autoflowing the text into another linked text box. This way you can start a story on the front page of a multipage newsletter or other publication and have the story continue on another page.

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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.

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The end of the school year is fast approaching. In addition to looking forward to school getting out for the summer, some of you might be thinking about running for student council or class officer. From campaign banners and posters, to flyers and newsletters, to campaign bumper stickers and buttons, Publisher can help you with your campaign. 

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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.

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