How can I design business cards w/ Micro Office ?

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New to Micro. Office setup . Trying to design business cards for my tattoo
company that i am trying to start. How do i go about doing so ? I love
suggestions & coaching . I am at (e-mail address removed)
 
Curly, this particular section is for Access database designers. If you look
to the left, you will see a list of discussion groups. Your question would
probably fit better in the "Word" group.
 
You can do it with Word but word is a really poor tool for that particular
task. It has a wizard that will generate a page full of business cards but
there is no way that I have seen to modify the design except by changing
each individual card??? I prefer Publisher if you have it. That is what I
use and I really like it. It is quite flexible and comes with a lot of good
basic designs. If you don't have Publisher, buy yourself a cheap out of the
box solution (< $30) at Staples or CompUSA.

One hint. Print the first page of labels on plain paper. Hold the plain
paper up to a strong light behind a page of your label stock to make sure
that the labels align properly within any graphic elements of the label
stock.
 
Thanks, Pat. I've been using Word because I always have, and Publisher
didn't exist when I first started using Office (is anyone else from the
Windows 3.0 era?). But now I need to spend several hours exploring
Publisher, and seeing what else I've been forcing Word to do that I could do
quicker and easier in Publisher.
 
Since we're getting a bit off-topic here I'll just add that when I needed to
create business cards in Word I ignored the wizard and the templates that
came with the card. Instead I created a 2 x 5 table, and used custom Styles
to format and position the text in one of the cells, then I added the
graphics in front of the text (or behind, but not wrapped or inline) with
the anchor locked to the paragraph mark below the cell. Once that was done
I copied and pasted into the other cells. I don't remember if I needed to
lock the anchors for all of the graphics individually.
Once the layout was complete the client wanted some changes, which I
accomplished by modifying the Styles. Since the graphics were anchored
outside of the table I could select all of them at once and nudge them with
Ctrl + the arrow keys.
Nothing against Publisher. It may well be far superior for business cards.
However, Word is quite servicable for the project. Once cards have been
designed, a template based on the layout can speed future designs.
Unfortunately, the best features of Word (such as Styles) are buried behind
layers of automation and misguided wizards. Word would be a much better
program if MS didn't assume that its users are incapable of understanding or
using the program.
 
Publisher
didn't exist when I first started using Office (is anyone else from the
Windows 3.0 era?).
Click to expand...

hey youngster... have some respect for your elders here! <vbg>

Yep. Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordstar before that too... not to mention
mainframes running TECO and that stunning advance, LaTEX.

John W. Vinson[MVP]
 
BruceM said:
Word would be a much better program if MS didn't assume that its users are
incapable of understanding or using the program.
Click to expand...

I agree. Using Word is like using a Macintosh. If you can't do it easily,
then you probably shouldn't even want to do it. I have to admit, though, at
least Apple didn't invent the Office Assistant (which I always kill as I'm
loading Office). Assistant was definitely a critical mass of "cute."
 
And you used gopher to surf the web (in ASCII, of course) . . .

My first modem was 128 BYTES per second, if I remember correctly. They do
say that memory is the second thing to go . . .
 
And you used gopher to surf the web (in ASCII, of course) . . .

My first modem was 128 BYTES per second, if I remember correctly. They do
say that memory is the second thing to go . . .
Click to expand...

ARPANet. One of the twelve sites at the time.

We did have 110 Baud modems - the kind with the cradle into which you
inserted the telephone handset. Downloading big files from Stanford
onto the computer at Harvard was... interesting... <g>

John W. Vinson[MVP]
 
Baud! That was the word I was trying to think of. I knew bytes wasn't
correct. It's that memory thing again . . . My first modem actually did
plug into the phone line, but it was connected to an 8-bit computer, which
was connected to a TV (B&W, 9"). The good old days. And being excited about
a dot-matrix printer that actually did descending characters! And going from
using an audio-cassette-tape for recording programs to a real floppy disk!
(One-sided, so we had to cut a notch in the cover to use the other side.)

I doubt that anyone under the age of 30 actually has any idea what we are
talking about . . .
 
Tee hee! I still have my old acoustic-coupler modem (which I was very
happy to have, when I first got it) lying around someplace. Today I
gave my church choir director a copy of _The Sacred Harp_ (it's public
domain, so I wasn't violating anyone's copyright) that I had in my
pocket on my flash memory -- 35 GB of JPEGs; it took him maybe a minute
to copy it to his hard disk. The olden days were fun (well, they became
fun after my wife gave me an Apple II), but tools like Access can do
stuff that I still think is pretty amazing. In a few minutes you can do
what once might take weeks to develop & test. I love Microsoft (as well
as other vendors of the terrific software we get to play with nowadays).

BTW, "Baud" was NOT the same as "bits per second", or at least not
originally. It was the number of changes per second of some quality of
the signal, such as voltage. You can imagine that, on a noisy channel,
this number was subject to some ... interpretation. And noisy channels
were not uncommon -- actually, they were kind of ubiquitous. Oh, yes,
and even if Hamming codes had been invented by then, they weren't yet
universally used. You got to live with what you got, and to be thankful
for that.

-- Vincent Johns <[email protected]>
Please feel free to quote anything I say here.
 
Having used both Word and Publisher to generate publications, I think
both are useful, but that Word is a bit more versatile. (I think
Publisher does a better job of providing document-design help, offering
suggestions, etc., but its files are not easy to convert to Word
format.) Word offers a helpful alternative to Access Reports, by
allowing one greater freedom in displaying the contents of the Query
underlying a Report. You do need to express everything you want to show
in your Word document via a single Access Query, which you invoke using
Word's "Mail Merge" facility. But, for example, if your Query generates
a mailing list, you can print them in 3 columns on a page, which is not
nearly as easy in an Access Report.

Incidentally, concerning business cards, an easy way to set that up is
to create the table that BruceM described, put what you want into the
upper-left cell, define a Bookmark containing the cell's contents
(including graphics, if you wish), and then into each of the other cells
simply use a link to it. For example, suppose you call the Bookmark in
the first cell "BusinessCard". Then in each of the other cells on the
page, you insert a "{REF BusinessCard}" Field. Any editing changes that
you make to the upper-left card are reflected in the remaining cells on
the page. (You might need to use Control-A, F9 to update the REF fields
after making a change.) For this to work, the graphics may have to
remain in line with the text (= NOT in front, behind, etc.).

Or, you can save to disk an image of the card you want to print and
invoke that in all cells of the table. For example, if your card is in
file BusinessCard.bmp, you might fill each cell of the table with a
"{INCLUDEPICTURE \d BusinessCard.bmp \* MERGEFORMAT}" field, which would
link to the *.BMP file. If you were to edit the image, all the cards on
the page would change to match the revised version.

Or, you could combine these (maybe for an advertisement, rather than
business cards): use a linked image for the graphics and boilerplate
text, and a "Mail Merge" field for names or other output from an Access
Query.

Publisher may allow you to do some of this, but my recollection is that
it's not as easy as it is in Word.

-- Vincent Johns <[email protected]>
Please feel free to quote anything I say here.
 
That's a really useful idea to use bookmarks in that way. I found that the
graphic does need to be inline, and that Ctrl A, F9 is needed to update the
fields. Text added at the end of the last line of text will not be updated
(since it is outside of the bookmark) until all of the text in the "active"
cell is selected and the bookmark is inserted again.
As I said (in different words) in another post in this thread, Word has a
lot of useful and versatile features that tend to get buried under a layer
of simplistic automation. Critics of Word often lament a lack of features
that are in fact part of the program. Were it not for newsgroups I would
not know one fourth of what Word can do.
Thank you for posting where the conversation started. I use the full Office
Professional suite (not so much Power Point, though), and am always glad for
new ideas.
 
BruceM said:
That's a really useful idea to use bookmarks in that way. I found that the
graphic does need to be inline, and that Ctrl A, F9 is needed to update the
fields. Text added at the end of the last line of text will not be updated
(since it is outside of the bookmark) until all of the text in the "active"
cell is selected and the bookmark is inserted again.
Click to expand...

In Tools --> Options --> "View" tab, if you check the "Show Bookmarks"
box, big black brackets show up around each bookmark, to make it obvious
what's included. It doesn't necessarily make the document any easier to
read, but it definitely helps with debugging.
As I said (in different words) in another post in this thread, Word has a
lot of useful and versatile features that tend to get buried under a layer
of simplistic automation. Critics of Word often lament a lack of features
that are in fact part of the program. Were it not for newsgroups I would
not know one fourth of what Word can do.
Click to expand...

:-) When my daughter was taking a geography class involving translating
a satellite photograph to a vector-format map, the students were
expected to use Corel Draw in the computer lab. to do the work. She
didn't have a copy of Corel Draw in her room, and the laboratory was
often closed when she wanted to work on her project... so I suggested
using Word. Word has some limitations -- it doesn't allow you to name
the layers in a vector image, for example, and there are some
inconveniences in editing the tangents of the control points -- but the
results were terrific, and the other students couldn't believe that she
had done the entire project in Word (plus Paint for a couple of included
bitmaps), and without having to do any VBA programming. (Using VBA, of
course, you can do just about anything, so that wouldn't have been so
remarkable, but she just used the ordinary user interface.)
Thank you for posting where the conversation started. I use the full Office
Professional suite (not so much Power Point, though), and am always glad for
new ideas.
Click to expand...

It was a while before I noticed that Excel will solve non-linear
optimization problems (good for such vital work as solving logic
puzzles), and the example spreadsheets that Microsoft supplies with
Excel show how to use it to develop a work schedule or to produce a
numeric solution of differential equations, just using the basic user
interface -- no programming needed. And all of these features are
available, with very little effort, to an Access database, since Access
users normally also have copies of Excel, Word, etc., available to them.
Cool stuff.

-- Vincent Johns <[email protected]>
Please feel free to quote anything I say here.
 
I can't say how useful Publisher is for other things since I've always used
Word but I got so frustrated with Word when trying to make business cards I
opened Publisher and couldn't believe how easy it was. You guys are passing
around a lot of good tips but if you just use Publisher, you don't need any
tips or tricks. It simply works - with the emphasis on SIMPLE.
 
I still remember my first experience using an acoustic coupler. My company
had just introduced this fabulous new technology for the programmers to be
able to edit their programs by using a teletype instead of punched cards. I
was editing away waiting for a response and my phone started ringing. In
confusion, I picked the handset out of the cradle and answered it. It was a
wrong number.
 
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