DIY Halloween decorations

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 to a copy shop. To decide between using a desktop printer, or taking your publication to a copy shop or commercial printer we've got a handy table:

Let's say that you want a big skeleton door hanging. For that you're going to want to start with one of our blank banner templates. Open Publisher, select the Banners group of templates, and scroll to the bottom to see the blank sizes and select one that's the right size. For our example, let's select one that's 24 inches wide by 60 inches long.

Next, on the Insert tab, click Clip Art and search for skeleton. (Be sure to select the check-box to search Office.com.)

Find a suitable skeleton and double click to insert it into your publication.

Grab one of the corner handles and drag to make the skeleton fill the page.

You can drag the sides of this image out beyond the page to make the skeleton a little heftier since the image itself is still on the page. (By the way, this is called bleeding.)

And there you have it. Just save the publication as a PDF and take it to your local copy shop for printing. You may ask to print it on a transparency or Mylar to make the skeleton really stand out.

Happy Halloween!

-- Bob deLaubenfels