Microsoft Publisher is a very powerful tool that is often overlooked. I often use it to make printables for this blog and wanted to share some tips on how to do this for yourself!

Create a Printable In Publisher

The key to a good printable is all about the fonts. I get most of my fonts from dafont.com but there are many other reputable sites out there as well. This post features other websites that offer fonts. One thing to note, be careful with downloading fonts from unknown sites – these files download as a .zip and are then installed onto your computer which opens you up to viruses and malware. Install all the fonts you want to use before opening Publisher so that they will load upon opening.

Create a new 8.5×11 document (or whatever size you want your printable to be printed onto). I generally either ignore the margins or change them to 0.2″ – I find that the print preview is much more accurate than these lines in what will print.

Text boxes make Publisher amazing to work with, but there is a slight edit that needs to be made. Right click on the textbox and select “Format Text Box”, in the “layout” tab, choose “none”.

This will allow the text boxes and text to be as close as you want it (or even overlap). Without this change, the text will try to space itself away from other text and you will constantly be fighting with it. As seen in the image below the top two text boxes have had this change made, the bottom two have not. You can see how “Fall” has been moved within its text box because it got too close to “Hello”.

If you add clipart or other images to the printable, make this same change to its layout. Sometimes, other fonts can be used as the clipart (like these Mickey Mouse or Fall fonts).

In order to make your design printable, it needs to be saved as a different type of file. I like to save it as both a PDF and a JPG – the JPG for the blog post and a PDF for people to download and print. When saving, select the highest quality in order to get clean lines. I like to put the JPG in the post which then links to the PDF for download.