I’m not hosting Thanksgiving this year, but I am creating the menu and place cards for our dinner with some friends. If I WAS hosting, I’d send these super cute Thanksgiving postcards as invitations (template courtesy of Avery Dennison, one of our template partners). This postcard is a Word 2007 template.
By the way, if you don’t like the image on the postcard, you can replace it with one from our Clip Art Thanksgiving images collection. To do this -
1. Download an image from our Thanksgiving images collection. Here are some links to different Clip Art searches that will give you lots of FREE images to choose from:
Cornucopia, Family, Food, Happy Thanksgiving, Harvest, Native Americans, Pilgrims, Prayer, Pumpkin Pie, Turkey.
2. Select the image in the template.
2. Right-click the image, and then click Change Picture. Go to your Picture | Microsoft Clip Organizer folder and find the image you want.
The menu and place cards I’ve selected are part of a Harvest design set created for Word 2007 templates and very easy to update with your own text.
I hope this inspires you to create a few extras for Thanksgiving this year that will make the day feel even more special. Happy Thanksgiving!
-Sheila
If you have used our very popular Monster.com compatible resume templates in your job search, we are happy to let you know we have now made that job search even easier with our new Easy Submit add-in for Word 2007.
Just follow these simple steps to download and use the add-in.
And don’t forget to leave us feedback and let us know how it works for you and what other types of add-ins you would like to see.
--Nancy
Over the past few weeks, our Submit a Template pipeline has been undergoing some construction. This has caused intermittent downtime and potential delays in getting the cool templates you submitted during this time to show up on Office Online. Well, I am happy to report that we are officially done with construction and community submitted templates are flowing once again. We hope any delay in getting your templates up and visible wasn't too much of an inconvenience to you. The templates submitted by the Office Online community have quickly become the backbone of our library. Keep up the great, creative, and productive work!
Click here to browse the latest submissions.
Sincerely,
Office Online Templateers
Get your Halloween groove on and plan a party. We’ve got templates and illustrations that will make putting together your party invitations, menu, etc. quick and fun.
Steps for making your own flyer, menu, place card, or gift certificate:
Here’s a new set of Halloween party templates we just published. They use free illustrations from the Clip Art site – to find them search for style 1450.
New Halloween Templates Design set
1. Download any of the templates above or find a different Halloween template on Office Online.
2. Edit the text in the template, save, and print.
Optional: Change the images in the template – you can find more Halloween illustrations on the clip art site.
Here’s a tip for adding images to templates in Word: Draw a text box first, and then paste your image into that text box. You can move the image freely around the document when you do this. When you’ve got the image placed, remove the text box background and outline color.
--Sheila
We've been getting a little press today for a new plug-in available for Word and PowerPoint 2007 that enables you to search Fotolia's stock photos and add them directly to your documents.
We think this type of add-in helps our users be more productive. Why not give it a try and tell us what you think!
--Nancy
Do you like to see what’s new in our Templates collection, but don’t have time to explore daily? If the answer is yes, we’ve got good news for you. Our all-up Office blog, known as Inside Office Online, is now publishing a template every day – with a handy download button so you can download it directly to your computer if you like it.
Of course you can always bookmark the Templates home page and look for updates there, but to get a daily dose, head on over to Inside Office Online and subscribe to the RSS feed. Who knows, you might run across something else of interest…
-- Nancy
Here you are, back from a long weekend, thinking nothing could get you interested in work today, but . . . what about the winners of our latest templates contest!?
Congratulations to Joy Miller, Maggie O., SMcGinnis and our very own Crabby Office Lady. (Yes, she qualifies - since there are no actual prizes, other than the extreme satisfaction of being a winner and being presented as such on our Templates home page, anybody can enter.)
You may or may not recall the theme of this contest was "School Rules: Award Certificates" - just in time for you to take advantage of all the creative ideas submitted by our clever users.
The best part about our contests is that all the entries are made available to you, for free.
And if you are one of our featured winners - congratulations! Your creativity caught the eyes of our MVP judges.
Now, give yourself an award:
--Nancy
Office Online Templates introduces our newest partner, LayoutReady, (a division of StockLayouts, LLC), with a set of real estate marketing templates available for free download– including brochures, flyers, newsletters, stationery, postcards, ads, and posters, for Microsoft Word or Publisher. Click here to view all LayoutReady templates on Office Online. 
LayoutReady's professionally-designed, royalty-free Publisher and Word templates include customizable files, high quality stock photos and illustrations, and are produced to standards suitable for printing on color laser or inkjet printers.
Read more about creating agency-quality marketing materials in-house at their Web site: www.layoutready.com.
-- Aaron
First, a cautionary tale. . . Years ago, when I was a freelance magazine writer, I left what I thought was a funny message on my answering machine (remember answering machines?). I just had an urge one day to be "creative" with my message.
My message sounded like I was actually answering the phone, then paused for a few beats - giving the caller enough time to start talking - and then launched into the 'leave a message' recording. I thought it would amuse people. Instead, I was horrified to come home and discover that the very day I recorded that message, I received a call from a very large sports magazine to whom I had been pitching a story. The editor, who did leave a message, sounded annoyed more than amused. I was embarrassed and promptly changed it back to a more professional sounding recording.
Why am I telling you this? Because I'm about to suggest you have a little 'fun' with your Out Of Office messages. Although I love amusing Out Of Office messages, the incident above cured me from going overboard, especially now that I'm in a large, corporate work environment. Got that? Be amusing? Sure. Annoying? Never.
Our very own Annik Stahl, aka Crabby Office Lady, not only lightens the load of our customers by bringing her unique and humorous slant to help with Office applications, she also makes us laugh both in email and person. Even when she's on vacation, she keeps us amused - via her Out Of Office messages. Now, you can mimic her clever messages, as she has created a new template available here. Imagine the possibilities. . . .
--Nancy
Did you know we have an entire team devoted to accessibility? You can find plenty of useful information in The Accessibility Advocate column, but today I'd like to point you directly to a specific column devoted to assisting people who are color blind.
My dad was color blind. He had some issues with greens and reds, and when he started painting later in life I was amazed at how good his paintings were, despite what others might view as a handicap in producing art. Still, I think he would have really benefited from the type of color selector template featured in David Ludwig's article.
Comparable to a painter's color wheel - this template enables color blind people to ensure the colors they choose work well together.
If you are too timid to experiment on your own, you can always download free, ready-made templates for all the Office applications. But, I'd encourage you to read Dave's article to learn more. It should give you the confidence to make your own design choices. Who knows, maybe you'll even be confident enough to submit one of your templates to our latest contest...
--Nancy
We are introducing our newest partner, Templates Wise, with a selection of free PowerPoint templates made available to you for free download on Office Online Template. Click here to search for Templates Wise templates on Office Online.
Download, customize and take full control over your PowerPoint presentations. All Templates Wise templates are free to download and include pre-designed slides by a professional graphic designer.
Templates Wise is dedicated to providing free, high-quality PowerPoint templates and music loops. Since 2006, Templates Wise has built a solid reputation on the Internet, and has reached millions of downloads.
To view even more, visit the Templates Wise website: www.templateswise.com
-- Aaron
(If you’re here reading this, you have probably heard – more than once – about our upcoming award certificate template contest. But you haven’t heard it from me, so pay attention.)
Here we are, at the mid-point in August when the thoughts of parents everywhere turn to... BACK TO SCHOOL! To mark this time-honored holiday — I mean tradition — we're holding another template contest. In this go-around, we want to see your most brilliant and snazziest award certificate templates. Sounds simple, you say?
Maybe so. But we want you to think beyond the same old awards: Best Speller (*yawn*), Most Considerate (*suck-up*), or Top Attendance (*oh, come ON!*). How about getting a little creative? You're going to need shiny text and sparkling images if you want to stand out to our judges. I wrote about the last template contest we had, and if you take a look at the winners of that contest, you'll see the sort of standards we're talking about.
But don't be shy or intimidated. This is a great opportunity to show off your mad skillz and learn something along the way.
Although I am not eligible to participate in this contest (I think the templates team is afraid of what I might do — and rightly so), I did come up with a few of my own:
- Most eccentric science teacher
- Most anxious parent of perfectly thriving kid
- Most awkward student-teacher video store back-room moment
- Happiest parents as sullen newly-minted teen goes back to school
- Most macho combo coach/remedial math teacher
And of course, my favorite: Best book report in 140 characters or less:
![image[5]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/templates/WindowsLiveWriter/5e9dc0598219_9E94/image%5B5%5D_thumb.png "image[5]")
Think you have what it takes? Read about the guidelines and how to submit here: Office Online Templates Contest. You only have until August 28th!
“I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.” – Jack Benny
- Crabby
This blog post originally appeared on the Inside Office Online blog, where you can find Office productivity tips blogged daily.
Students are still out having fun or looking for ways to make some money this summer, but most teachers are back to school this month.
If you’re a teacher who has resolved to let your computer help you with fall classroom preparation, why not test drive Microsoft Home and Student 2007. The Home and Student edition includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote, all the products you need to take advantage of the back-to-school templates collection.
Teachers of all grade levels can put these back-to-school templates to good use this month:
2009-2010 academic year calendar This Excel calendar automatically tabulates the total number of entries for each month. Use it in the classroom and print it out to send home with students when school starts.
School supplies sign-out sheet Budgets are tight this year, and so are supplies. Everyone will appreciate your thoughtful reuse of classroom supplies.
Back-to-school presentation The PowerPoint 2007 Global read design template is an excellent slide background for a presentation developed for students, colleagues, or parents.
Electronic teacher grade book If you teach the same subject to multiple classes, try this Excel template to simplify translating points and percentages into a letter grade. An elementary school grade book template is available for teachers of younger students.
Classroom newsletter Resolved to connect better with parents this year? Use a Word classroom newsletter template like this one to start communicating with parents and students immediately.
Don’t forget to submit your award certificate entries to the Office Online "School Rules Award Certificate Contest" and help millions of Office customers make their students, teachers, and volunteers very happy. Winners will be promoted online the week of September 7th.
What are your school year resolutions?
--leslie
Is your awesome Community submitted template not performing the way it should? Here are a few tips from our Community Content Publisher that can boost those download numbers.
Note this quick review on filters when viewing community submitted templates:
[Strict]- Allows only templates created by Microsoft or its partners to be displayed.
[Moderate]- Allows Microsoft and partner templates, plus templates from established community members to be displayed.
[Unfiltered]- All templates are displayed, even from non-established community members.
- Give your templates clear, concise and descriptive names. Consider what might make strong search terms such as “business calendar”, or “holiday card.” To contrast, names like “template” or “Bob” or “heading” won’t tell the world much about your template. Read more about this here: Name your templates with strong titles.
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Example: This Certificate of Graduation by captsa8lq states very simply it’s content with at least two title words that alone or together also make great search terms: certificate and graduation. |
- Make the first page photogenic and descriptive of contents. Think in terms of covers for reports or books, or that first slide in a PowerPoint presentation. If it is the layout that you really want to show, can you bring that attractively to the front page?
Note -- when you are creating that template in the software of choice (Word, Publisher, etc.), you can check the first page/slide in Print Preview. This page will become both preview and thumbnail images.
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Example: This Address/Phone Book ~ Blank by freeindeed6108 contains a 4 page template layout for Publisher. The cover page shows up very well as a thumbnail, whereas the 2nd page could be hard to identify and/or stand out in a gallery of thumbnail images. |
- Add a description to give users more information about how the template is used or why they will like it
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Example: This One Click Calendar Wizard 1900-2078 by Sairaj strikes a friendly tone telling us how to use the template and what elements can be customized: “The template allows you to create a calendar for any year between the range 1900- 2078 just by simply typing the year on top of the page. Yup its that Simple :-) Also you can customize the calendar by simply replacing the pictures with your own pictures or you can get some clipart from this site itself. Enjoy” |
- Choose the category that best matches what you are posting (Our submission tool may make an initial guess for you based on filename and content. Double check and select a better fit if it seems wildly off the mark).
- Make your template compelling with Clip Art to add visual interest.
- If it’s an Excel template, set the print area so that our image capture tool can get the best possible image. See Define or clear a print area on a worksheet for more on this.
- Make your content easy to customize. Using Office Themes allows your template user to change color schemes, and font or spacing formatting. Use content controls where you know someone will need to enter their own text
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Example: Elizabeth Koon created this Church Bake Sale Flyer that as-is contains complete design, font choice, and color scheme, as well as clip art from Office Online Clip Art & Media - cupcakes (j0182704.jpg ) , loaves (j0422953.jpg), and bagels (j0424367.jpg). Easily change title, images, colors, and font. This adaptability allows multiple uses from a single attractive layout. |
- As a last resort, if your template didn’t turn out to be as popular as you had hoped, choose to update. See Update your template for more information.
- And finally, why not follow by example. Here are just a few more of our top Community Template submitters recently featured on the Office Online Templates home page: INGTERNET, Collin M , mnkeymanda, ThemeGallery, Brainy Betty PowerPoint Templates, momtothree, Templates by Lory.
Here are the links you need to get started: Submit a Template and see more Help on Template Submission. And just in case you're inspired to try out these new tips with some immediate traffic – upload a template between now and the end of August 28, 2009 11:59 p.m, to our August 2009 Award Certificate Contest.
--Aaron
ModelSheet Software is one of our templates partners who provides great Excel spreadsheet templates. Today, please welcome our guest blogger, Dick Petti, from ModelSheet Software:
People tend to write off spreadsheets for moderately large analyses. This week I built a 216 MB financial plan template and delivered it to a user. This is the largest Excel workbook I have ever used. (This is the size of the xls file; the xlsx file is smaller.)
I tried out the template in Excel 2007 on a vintage 2008 Pentium PC with 2.0 GHz CPU and 4 GB RAM. I concluded that the 216 MB template is useful but less convenient than a 97 MB version of the same model, if interactive performance counts.
• Entering a new value in a cell took 3-4 seconds, whereas the smaller version takes about one second.
• Opening nine collapsed Excel groups on sheet 'Inputs' takes about 20 seconds, compared to 4-5 seconds for the smaller file.
Excel can handle even larger workbooks, but its interactive performance degrades.
We generated this workbook on a Pentium PC with a 64-bit version of MS-Windows and 8 GB of RAM, in roughly two hours. We estimate that this PC could handle an Excel workbook that is 10-20% larger, or about 250 MB, before running out of space. The size of Excel workbook that we can generate appears to be limited only by the amount of RAM and the amount of time available to the process.
You can see a small sample of the same financial plan template here: Business unit financial plan. The tools we use to build this spreadsheet are described at http://www.modelsheetsoft.com . Because of the way the model is generated, the huge template is no less reliable than the tiny sample.
Microsoft Excel has made great strides in handling larger workbooks, and our tools enable us to exploit that capability most effectively. I shudder to think what kind of effort would be required to manually build a 200 MB workbook with the complexity of our financial plan templates.
If you want to build spreadsheets of this complexity and this size (half this size is more useful when interactive performance counts), then drop me a line.
--Dick Petti | rjpetti@modelsheetsoft.com
Thank you, Dick! Be sure to check out ModelSheet Software's templates on Office Online.
