Banners!

With graduations just around the corner, you might be thinking about ways to celebrate success--and banners do that in just the right big way.

You can create and print banners in Word. However, if you can make your banner with Microsoft Publisher, you can use a tiling option and set additional color specifications when you print your banner.

Don't have Publisher? That's okay--because this is the Word blog, and you have another helpful tool at hand: Templates.

The easiest way to make a banner in Word is to start with a Word banner template. When you download and open the template, the correct layout and printing settings are already applied.

Some of the templates are letters that you can print out and arrange to say your message. Other templates have art and borders.

Find a design that you like, or a design that comes close to what you want. Download the template, and then open it.

Click the File tab, click Save As, and then save your banner file using a different name. That way, you won't make changes to the original template, and you can use it again sometime.

Now comes the fun part. You can select the text and change the words to say what you want. You can choose a new font. You can even choose new images and add artistic effects.

If you're printing the banner at home, you'll print out parts of it on individual pieces of paper that you can then string together or connect by taping the pages together on the back.

-- Joannie Stangeland