Electronic letterheads?

Question

At work, we use ready printed letterheaded paper to print letters for sending in the post.

Technology is now requiring that we send a lot of documents via email on letterhead. Our current method is to print to letterhead and scan. But it looks rubbish to say the least.

Is there a way (software or print driver) to have a pdf doc of our letterhead which we can merge onto when printing from Word/Excel so we end up with a nice letterheaded electronic document?

I know we could create the letterhead within word by inserting headers/footers, but our headed paper has background images which would become very time consuming to insert into each document required electronically.

Thanks!

Answer 1

How about scanning your letterhead in, setting it as a background and saving the result as a letterhead template?  Here are the steps in Word versions prior to Word 2007:

1. Scan in your letterhead and save the image.

2. In Word, click the Format->Background->Printed Watermark menu item.

3. Click the Pictures radio button.

4. Click the Select Picture button.

5. Find and select your scanned page.

6. Click Close.

You may have to play with the watermark options to get things just right. but this should work.

Also, for printed documents, be sure to set Drawing Objects to print this way:

1. Click the Tools->Options menu item.

2. Click the Print Tab.

3. Under Include with Document, check the checkbox for Drawing Objects.

4. Click OK.

You could just use this document as it is, OR, you could make it a document template so you can use it whenever you want to, here's how:

1. Click on the File->Save As menu item.

2. Give the file a name.

3. In the Save as Type list box, select Document Template. The directory should automatically change to where your other templates are and the file type should change to .dot

4. Click OK.

Now whenever you want to use a copy of your letterhead,

1. Click the File->New menu item

2. Click the General Templates item on the sidebar.

3. Select your template and create a new document from it.

Further, if you're worried about sending Word documents that might be altered, you can protect the document from being edited with these steps:

1. Click the Tools->Protect Document menu item.

2. Click the Forms radio button.  This protects all text not in form fields.

3. Give the document a password.  Write it down so you don't forget it.

4. Click OK.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Put everything you need into header/footer of the document, set your margins and any other preferences and save it as a template. You then only need to open the template and add any text.