10 Easy Steps to Creating Professional-Looking Letterhead in Office 2007

SOHO business owners want to present a professional image, but don't want to find themselves bulk ordering tens of thousands of sheets of letterhead and second pages. It's expensive, and inconvenient to store all that paper.

The following is a short tutorial on how to create letterhead in Office 2007 that looks great, and presents as if it had prepared by professional support staff. Start with a new blank document.

Step One

Insert a 2 column, 1 row table. The left hand box will accommodate your addressees information. Type "Addressee Information" in this box, so you will be able to easily find it later, when the gridlines are gone! In the right hand box, click "Insert Date" from the Insert tab. Now, each time you use your template, it will have the correct date.

Step Two

Below this table, hit enter to create a space, and insert a second table, also 2 columns wide and 1 row in length. Type "Attention" in the left hand box, and drag the line at the centre over until it is just to the right of the word "Attention".

Step Three

If you want a reference box, hit enter to create another space, then insert a 3 column table with as many rows as you will typically need. Bear in mind that if you make it two rows deep and need three when you go to type your letter, you only have to tab, at the end of the last row, and Word will create a new row for you, automatically.

Step Four

If you want a line separating the address etc from the body of the letter, hit the "minus" or the "equals" button three times, and then hit enter.

Step Five

Hit enter again and then click on the "Page Layout" tab. Click "Breaks" and then click on "Continuous".

Step Six

Now hit enter several times, and create your signature line. Then click enter as many times as it takes to create a second page in your document.

It doesn't look like much yet, so let's go back to the "Insert" tab and click on "Header". You can put anything you want in the header. Play with fonts and sizes, add color, or insert a logo. It's up to you.

Step Seven

If you want your header to appear on every page, you can stop playing with the header now. But if you only want to show your letterhead on the first page click "Next Section" in Navigation. It will take you to the header on the second page that you created. Now you will see a link under Navigation that says "Link to Previous" Click this to turn it off. Your "letterhead" will now appear only on page one.

Step Eight

Okay, now the footer. Go to the footer on page two and open it. Again, click the link to turn off the "Link to Previous". Choose a footer that you want from the style menu, and close the footer. Word will now know not to print a page number on the first page, and to start numbering (at 2) on the second page.

Backspace from the last point where your cursor sits in the document, to reduce it to a single page document. You don't want two pages printing, when you write a one page letter!

Step Nine

Lastly, we will clean up the tables. Highlight the entire table, and turn the gridlines off, using the grid icon in the "paragraph" tab. Do this with each table you created.

Step Ten

Click the Office button in the top left corner and choose "Save As". You can now save your document as a Word Template (Letterhead) which will become the basis for all of your subsequent letter templates.

There. You've just created fully customized letterhead that you can have access to on your desktop, notebook, or tablet.