Microsoft Publisher comes with a seemingly endless supply of publications you can choose from, and you are bound to find one that meets your needs in some way. You can always edit any of the existing templates to create a custom template, deleting elements, adding new ones, and so on. With an online connection, you can access even more templates.

By default, Publisher displays both installed templates and online templates whenever you click the File tab and click New. Of course, the online templates appear only if you are connected to the Internet. As you begin to peruse the various categories, the Backstage view displays a navigation bar allowing you to move from one page to the next as you examine the templates and preview what they look like.

If you do not see a template you like, you can search for a particular kind of template using the Search tool. Whenever you encounter an online template you want, you must download it in order to use it. Depending on your connection speed, the process takes only a moment or two.

Many of the documents you create in Publisher require gathering content from another source. For example, you might be working on a newsletter and your colleague has composed a story in another program. You can import text-based files into Publisher to use as newsletter articles or to use in as content in other types of publications.

So how do you bring in a text file and place it into a publication? Ordinarily, you might think copying and pasting does the trick. However, Publisher offers you another method to use. You can import a text story without having to open the originating program. This saves you some time and steps.

When you import a text file with the Insert File command, it flows into the text box where you want it to appear. Any extra text that does not fit into the text box flows into the next frame or into overflow.

When you select a text box in Publisher, you can move it around the document wherever you want it. Sometimes, however, you need to move it only a small amount of space. With the box selected, you can press the keyboard arrow keys to nudge a text box ever so slightly up, down, to the left, or to the right, depending on which arrow key you press. This is a handy little trick for when you need to move a box, but dragging it moves it too much or not precisely enough.

The nudge feature is set up to move a selected box 0.13" every time you press the arrow key for the direction you want to move. You can change this setting to be more or less. Using the program's Options dialog box, you can specify a different amount to suit the way you work. You may want to nudge boxes more or less than the default setting. Just enter your own value into the field.

You may find yourself working on a longer publication using lots of pages, such as a newsletter or brochure. What happens if you need to move a story, associated graphics, and all the other objects found on the page to another location in the document? For example, maybe the story you placed back on page four is now a front page story. You can certainly use the tried-and-true practice of copying and pasting each element to its new location on a new page, but you may prefer a more direct method. Thankfully, Publisher has just the tool for the job — the Move Page dialog box.

You can specify exactly where you want the page inserted, either below or above another page. If your document has a two-page spread, both of the pages move as a unit.

If you want to move a single story instead of a page, use the Cut and Paste commands instead.

Text boxes are the receptacles for your publication stories and content, and depending on the template you use, how much text fits into a box is limited by the box size. If you try to place too much text into a box, it overflows to another. When this is not a solution, you can try Publisher's Text Fit commands to remedy the problem.

The Text Fit control gives you four distinct options to try for fitting text into a text box. The Best Fit option automatically resizes the text to fit every time you resize the text box. The Shrink Text On Overflow option shrinks the text inside the text box if any overflow text exists. The Grow Text Box to Fit option does just what its name implies: It resizes the text box to fit the text. The Do Not Autofit option tells Publisher not to automatically adjust the text size to fit.

Publisher automatically hyphenates text to help display as much text as possible in a text box. Hyphens break up words that do not fit at the end of a line. As a space-saver idea, this is a good one. However, not every publication you create needs or warrants hyphenated text, and in some cases, the hyphenation ends up looking far worse than the space it saves. You can control whether hyphenation is applied or not, and even control it manually.

The Hyphenation dialog box offers controls for turning off automatic hyphenation or controlling it manually on a case-by-case basis. By default, hyphenation is set up to occur when text breaches the 0.25" area at the right border of the text box. You can set a smaller hyphenation zone, such as 0.05" to achieve less hyphenation. If you enter a larger value, you can expect more hyphenated words.

When you turn off the feature, hyphenation is no longer applied to the selected text box at all. You can also activate the Manual feature and manually determine what hyphenated words you keep or dismiss in a text box.

If you insert your own hyphens, Publisher does not remove them if you turn off the automatic hyphenation feature. You must remove them yourself.

Turn On Manual Hyphenation

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  Repeat step 4 to continue editing each occurrence.

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Tip

More Options!

You can turn off the hyphenation settings for new text boxes you add in Publisher. To do so, you must open the program's Options dialog box. Click the File tab and click Options to open the Publisher Options dialog box. Click the Advanced tab and uncheck the Automatically Hyphenate in New Text Boxes check box (

Did You Know?

If hyphenation is causing you problems, you can always try resolving the issue by resizing your text box or adjusting the Hyphenation Zone setting.

You can e-mail your publication to share it with a colleague or boss, or even a friend. Microsoft Publisher gives you a variety of options for e-mailing files. If you have a multipage publication, for example, you can choose to e-mail just the current page. This option inserts the page in the message body of your e-mail as an HTML element. You can also e-mail all the pages and insert them as a single page into the message body.

Another option is to simply e-mail the publication as a file attachment. When you select this option, the publication is attached to the message, and in order for recipients to open the file, they, too, must have Publisher installed.

If the recipient does not have Publisher installed, you can try sending the publication as a PDF or XPS file. Both formats retain the formatting of the publication, but the contents cannot be easily edited. The recipient must open the file before viewing its contents.

This task demonstrates the Send Current Page option and the E-mail pane that opens for filling in a recipient. If you choose the Send All Pages option, Publisher prompts you to save your file in a separate dialog box first, and then opens the E-mail pane.

Some of your Publisher publications may require professional printing, especially if your desktop printer cannot handle all the binding, trimming, and finishing required, or if you need to print out large quantities of materials. Commercial printers can take over and help you reproduce your work on professional printing presses and various equipment. Thankfully, Publisher 2010 can assist you in starting the process with options to help you prepare the publication.

You can choose from several quality settings when preparing your file. The Commercial Press setting creates the largest file and saves the file to the highest quality settings for offset printing. If you prefer to optimize the publication for desktop printing at a high-end copy shop, choose the High quality printing option. Use the Standard option to create a compressed file suitable for online viewing, or the Minimum size option for regular old computer display.

In addition to a quality settings, you can also specify whether you want to create a PDF or Publisher format file or both.

After deciding on your commercial printer options, you can then follow the Pack and Go Wizard prompts to copy your publication to a disk or other location. The wizard packs the publication and its linked files into a single file you can take or send to a commercial printer.