Creating a monthly company newsletter

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to start creating our monthly company newsletter. It's going to be about 3-4 pages, and it's going to look something like this. It's going to be, I guess, less of a traditional Word document, but things all over the place, more of a design piece. So we're going to learn these features to make something like this. All right, let's go ahead and do it.

So first up, we've opened up Word, we're going to go to 'New', and we're just going to start with a 'Blank document'. And because I'm working on an European version of Word, it's set to 'A4', I'm going to switch mine to US 'letter', and to do that we're going to go to 'Layout', 'Size', I'm going to pick US 'letter'. Let's hit 'Save' by clicking this little icon in the top left here. It's going to go to 'Save As', I'm going to click 'Browse'. I'm going to put mine in my 'Documents', in the side here. I've got this folder already called 'Word Class File'. Open that up. We'll call it something similar to the project we've done earlier, for our letterhead, and we're going to do this one, Bring Your Own Laptop is the company, we’re going to call this one newsletter, and we'll call this one 'April 2017', 'BYOL Newsletter - April 2017'. And 'V1' at the end just so that we can keep versions, if we need to do any changes, or any people come back with comments, we can just use 'V1', 'V2', 'V3'. Let's hit 'Save'. Great!

Next thing we need to do is, we're going to work out our columns. Now this one here is my kind of finished version, so I want this kind of like-- it's kind of a three column layout where it is too straddled over here, and there's one on the side. There's two ways to do it, and the way that we’re going to do it-- I’ll show you the way that you could do it, it depends on the way you're going to design. We're going to go to 'Layout', go to this one that says 'Columns', and there's this one here, you can see this little icon here, 'Right', it’s going to kind of do what we want.

You can see at the top here, and the guides gives you an indication of these two. A nice way to do as well-- And a cool little shortcut is, if you do '=lorem', spelt that way, and then, two brackets '( )', and then side of that, put in, say something like 50, '=lorem(50)’, it's going to put in 50 paragraphs, something like that. So just after here, put in a 'return', you can see, it just fills in a bunch of what's called Lorem Ipsum, just fake text. 

I'm just showing you this, yes, it's cool, put in place holder text, but it's also good just to show you the columns. So this is going to be-- that would work, for this, if I didn't want to do this red box in the background. It's going to be easier at the moment just to have one column, and a big margin on the right. And then just put this in as a separate text box later on. So that's what I've done in this design. You can decide, if you don't have this big red box, and you just have text running down here, it'd be perfect to use this columns 'Right', of course, there's a 'Left' option as well.

So I'm going to 'undo' that, so I'm going to, see the 'undo' options up here, I'm using 'Control Z' on a PC, I'm just getting back the stuff I've got, just the regular full width. There's a couple of things I want to do now, these columns-- I'm going to leave the columns as it is, what I want to do is play around with the margins. Let's look at that.

So we're going to 'Margins', and I'm going to first of all start with 'Narrow'. Normal position’s quite far from the edges, but I want mine to be more of a magazine feel, and a magazine I feel, it's a bit close to the edges. You can see the text starts a little close to the edge, that's great. So 'Margin' set to 'Narrow'. 

The next thing I'd like to do is-- actually I'd like to push this right hand margin right in here. There's a couple of things you can do; under 'Margins' , click 'Custom Margins', and I'm going to set mine on the 'Right' here to '3.3'. The reason it's 3.3, it just kind of splits it into 3 even columns, and not play around with it before, so you might have to adjust yours as you're working. Let's click 'Okay'. You can see, my margin's now going to be in here, so if I do my fancy '=lorem', and I'll type in '30', '=lorem(30)', you can see there, it's not columns anymore, it's just the page, but has a nice, big, fat 'Right' margin so that I can put that text box in there later on. I'm going to 'undo'. Great! Hit 'Save'.

Next up, we're going to bring in some text, and this can be quite important because there's a couple of ways of bringing in text to make sure-- to keep the formatting, lose the formatting, yes, there's a couple of options. I've got some text for you to bring in, so I’m going to go to-- I clicked on 'File' on the top left, click on 'Open', then go to 'Browse', find the files that you downloaded. Mine's on my 'Desktop', if you haven't downloaded the exercise files there'll be a link on the page here somewhere for them. Let's go to 'Word Exercise Files', there’s one called 'Newsletter', and we're going to bring in this 'Newsletter Text - page 1'. Click 'Open'. I'm going to grab all of this, and I'm going to copy it, so I'm going to go to, up here, where it says 'Copy', and now I'm going to close it down.

So we're going to bring in that text from that one. You might be copying and pasting from an email, from anything, PDF, depends, they're all a bit same. Now, I could just use my shortcut, 'Control V' to paste, and it brings it through exactly as it was. That's not what I want, there's lots of formatting going on, so I just want to get rid of it. There's two options, two extra options. Under 'Paste' here, this first one, gives you-- can you see, I just hover above and it gives you like a little preview of what it's going to do. Really handy, thank you, Word. 

Where it says 'Keep Source Formatting', which is exactly how we did it, but then there's these other two. This one here is going to bring through things like the headings, and you can see there are italics there, and there's bold there, so, like the really plain basics, which might be really handy. If you've got a really long document, and there are italics and bolds, it needs to remain, this could be an option. For me though, I want to bring this last option, which is like a super clean, clear of everything, and just plain old text. Click the last option. Lovely!

So, that is how to bring in text, we've got couple of different options. Now let's look at bringing in some images.