Using Microsoft Word templates
Word user manual
If all the documentation that flows out of your organisation to clients and to the wider public is consistent, clear and pleasing to the eye, you’ve overcome the first hurdle in communicating with your target audience.
So often when material comes our way in the course of a busy day we are looking for an excuse to push it to one side and get back to what we were doing. That’s easy when we are faced with a document that’s a dog’s breakfast of mismatched or misconceived styles and themes – it goes straight in the bin.
But when the material you receive from a source looks polished and professional, you’ll register (often unconsciously) that these are serious people who won’t waste your time.
It can be a simple matter to establish a series of Microsoft Word templates that all your staff can use for correspondence, marketing materials, proposals and tender responses, accounting – whatever the day-to-day collateral that’s part of your business communication. That way, everything that goes out under your name will look consistent and presentable, inviting the potential customer to read on. When you set up your template, you can define all the styles you want people to be able to use (paragraph text, headings, bullet points, table text, etc.). You can establish exactly how these elements should look, such as the font type, font size, spacing and alignment. You can even set up shortcut keys to apply each style. Once you have a defined template, it is easy for anyone in your organisation to produce documents that adhere to your corporate branding. Now all you have to worry about is the content.
TIP: You can read a brief but useful overview of styles in Word in this article from the Microsoft website, ‘Style basics in Word’.
