Dear all, welcome to this tutorial! Let's see in a short time how to use
Microsoft Publisher, the Office product dedicated to digital publicizing.
Visit our YouTube channel and official website to get more content,
extras and in-depth tips for Microsoft Office!
Microsoft Publisher is the right tool to realize anything that must turn
into book pages, magazines but also single-page advertisements and flyers
in a very easy and intuitive interface.
This starts from its Home page, showing several ready templates on top and
your most recent projects at the bottom. On the left you can go to New to
get the full list of page templates available, from custom templates to
blank ones, with lots of standard sizes available. To see how to use
Publisher, let's start from a blank Letter template.
The new project made opens on the main workspace, with all the tools
and features available inside the Ribbon bar above and the big Preview on
the center, which is the place where you edit and customize your pages.
You can also zoom in and out by holding down the CTRL key.
The Publisher project, also called Publication, is made by several pages
and each page is made by different kinds of objects, including tables,
pictures, graphic shapes and text.
The first thing to do on a new project is to set the page options and aids
you need most. Inside the Page Design tab you can adjust the Orientation
and the Size of all the pages and also set the Margins to keep off the
borders. You can also import and use any ready template with Change
Template and add any Page Background if you want.
Use Guides to define green guidelines that help you at respecting the
layout and alignment of the current page shown on the Preview. Add
horizontal and vertical guides and edit them to fit the desired layout
you are looking for.
From the View tab you can enable other drawing aids, which are shown on
the Preview but not rendered in your final project at all. Enable the
Guides, the panels, the text Baselines or the object Boundaries in blue
color. The Ruler can be useful to check the page placement with real units
shown. In case these are not correct, you can change these by going to
File, Options and then to Advanced.
Once the page is ready, you can add several objects from the Home tab.
Shapes are graphic objects representing lines or closed shapes. Drop
any by clicking and dragging on the Preview and use the Format tab above
to adjust filling, borders, color and effects.
The Text Boxes are rectangular shapes with no fill that contain text.
With Draw Text Box click and drag to create a text box, which delimits
where its text content can spread and distribute. Then type in and use
either the Drawing Tools to adjust the text box as a shape or the Text Box
Tools to set all the text properties such as font, style, size, filling
color and any outline.
Under Text you can also fit text with its box or change its direction by
90 degrees. Inside Alignment you can set the text alignment, apply
multiple columns or safe margins within the text box. Use Typography to
add any Drop Cap or special styles.
On the Home tab you can go to Paragraph to adjust the distribution of the
text paragraphs, which are parts of text content you create whenever
you make a new line with the Enter key. Set indentation and also line
spacing before, after any paragraph or within the lines of the same
paragraph.
The Ruler is a powerful tool to adjust paragraphs. Place the marker
on the interested paragraph and use the ruler markers above to adjust its
distribution. Use the left and the right markers to adjust margins and
half of the left marker to set the margins of either the first line or the
other lines of the paragraph.
When the text box is too small to show all the text content it gets
red nodes and a dots button. You can use the first ones to resize the
box enough or click on the dots to choose where to extend the missing
text content such as an existing text box, any shape or a new text box
where you like most. These two objects get linked, showing the text
content from the first text box to the second object through their arrow
button. These objects can be placed on the same page or on different pages.
Besides shapes and text you can also add Tables after defining rows and
columns. Type in its cells and use the Design tab above to adjust
appearance, color, borders, text properties and the Layout tab to manage
the table columns, rows and alignment.
With Pictures you can import your own pictures or pick free ones online.
Use Format to correct the appearance, add borders and effects or include
ready pieces of text as captions. Enable Crop to crop the image.
In case the picture is not ready you can reserve its slot on the page
layout by adding Placeholders from the Insert tab. These are transparent
images that you can auto-fill by dragging any picture on it. This can
also be done between two images.
You can import external files inside the pages as you do with pictures.
You can open these by double-clicking on their icon.
All the objects inside the page can be managed independently and in the
same way. Click on any object to select it and drag it to move, holding
down the Shift key to go horizontally and vertically. Use the nodes to
scale and rotate and also right-click to cut, copy, paste and delete the
object. Go to Format to adjust advanced formatting options.
In addition, you can click on Object Size at the bottom to get further
information on the real dimensions of the selected object.
In case objects and text overlap you can manage their visibility by using
the Arrange section of the Home tab. Use Bring Forward and Send Backward
to set if the current object must be placed above or below the others
overlapping. Whereas use Wrap Text to set how the text must distribute
when the current object meets it.
From the Insert tab you can also import complex objects ready to use, such
as Page Parts, Calendars, page Borders and Advertisements. All these are
called Building Blocks, which are multiple shapes, text boxes and objects
grouped together. In this way you can move and edit all these objects in
one move. These are ready building blocks but you can create your own ones
by selecting all the interested objects by holding down the CTRL key,
right-clicking and going to Group. Within the building block each object
is delimited by nodes with crosses and can't be moved, unless you Ungroup
the whole block first.
On the left side you have the Pages Navigation panel with all the pages of
your publication. You can right-click on any vacant space to create new
pages and click on any page to show it on the Preview. To change the order
between pages, just click and drag these within the list.
Besides these standard pages you also have the Master and the Catalog
Pages. The Master Pages are used to repeat their content on multiple pages
of your project. For example you can add any Header, Footer or page
numbering on this Master page to repeat these on all the pages of your
publication, without doing this manually on each page.
You go to View and then to Master Page to show all the Master Pages
available. You can also add any Header, Footer but also any object you want to
repeat. Then, on Apply To, choose where to apply the content of the Master
Page, on all pages or on selected ones. Use Close Master Page to come back
to the normal page Preview.
Whereas the Catalog Pages are used to create full list starting from a
.mdb Access database. We won't see this in this simple tutorial.
Once the publication is ready, go to File, Export to export it in
several printable and digital documents, such as .pdf, .html, or as a .pub
to reopen it on Publisher and edit it any time.
Thanks for watching this simple tutorial! Make sure to check our channel
to find more extras and videos dedicated to Microsoft Office!