Letterhead printing from Word

Rabbo

I have an ongoing issue with regards printing letterheads in our office.

We would like to print our letters from word onto pre-printed letterheads but we also need to be able to create pdfs of the letters with our company letterhead showing.

Obviously, it would be preferable not to have to scan printed letters just to have the company letterhead showing.

I would have thought this would be a common enough issue but google isnt giving me any real solutions.

Anyone have any ideas solutions?

Thanks!

invaderzimirl

make your letter head a water mark when prenting at 100% colour

Al Capwned

Why not print the company logo each time, and just use plain paper.
Very straightforward to save entire thing as a pdf then also.

AnCatDubh

I'm a bit rusty on Word automation so there may be better solutions or inbuilt solutions that i'm not familiar with however if stuck, you could try one or more of the following (b or c probably);

I initially thought you might be able to do something with sections ala have your letterhead in section 1 but only print section 2 which would be the body text of your letter, but i'm not sure that would format ok or would it just run your letter text over the preprinted stationary.

Plan B would be to insert your letter head as a graphic into your word template, and turn off printing of graphics for when you'd want to print on your preprinted stationary. AFAIK, this will preserve the space where the graphic was positioned.

Plan C is a variation to plan B. Insert your letterhead into the header of the doc. Configure it only to print on page 1, and show or hide the header when you go to print depending on what purpose you are printin for (on preprinted or not on preprinted).

In B and C above, it will be a pain in the rear to do each time, so realistically you are talking about automating it through recording of a macro or some vba scripting - quite simple stuff. You could even get it to continue to do the actual print, and then reset itself.

Assign the resulting macro or vba script to a toolbar, then when you want to print for preprinted stationary, you just hit the alternate print button which you've added to your toolbar.

Probably sounds more complicated than it is. By the way, i haven't done either so the ideas above are just for exploring if you are stuck.

Rabbo

Thanks for the replies folks. Im trying to avoid printing letterheads ourselves as quality just isnt the same.

I tried your suggestions AnCatDubh but I was hoping for something a little less messy.

Having a macro to temporarily turn off headers and footers, print and then turn the headers and footers back on would be an option but there dosent seem to be anyway of easily hiding or showing headers and footers.


Its hard to believe that his problem isnt more common...

beauf

The problem would seem to be Word only prints bitmaps, but to get sharp print on a logo, text you need a vector based graphic.

You can create a macro to delete headers and footers, and assign it to a button.

http://word.tips.net/T001777_Deleting_All_Headers_and_Footers.html

While deleting the header and footer might be simpler VBA. I think users would prefer a different approach. Default document set up to print to printer. Button to export to web version (PDF).

Word doesn't really like handling large graphics. So it were me I'd have the printing as the default. So wouldn't use headers and footers. I'd use a template with a table or a shape as place holder for the letterhead (or just a empty space) , then just print that off etc as normal. Then have a button that exports to PDF. Copies the doc, inserts the letter header into place holder or space and saves it as PDF.

I've done something similar with Word templates in the past. Had a design mode, which I turned off before printing the doc.

WMF/EMF are vector formats that word supports. You might try converting your letter head to those, (careful not to turn them into a bitmap) then insert the WMF/EMF into Word. Of course it depends on the letterhead design is thats suitable for conversion. Again it might be useful to wrap this in a export to PDF button for your users.