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Microsoft Publisher

Desktop publishing power for smaller businesses

Microsoft Publisher is a desktop publishing (DTP) programme for home and small business users who either don't have the time to master complex DTP programmes or choose not to pay for the services of a professional designer.

Microsoft Publisher has been designed for people who have no prior design experience who want to create a professional, consistent look across all marketing material. The programme comes complete with professionally designed templates and wizards to guide you through the creation of high-quality brochures, business cards, letterheads, newsletters, flyers and other business collateral like web pages, catalogues and calendars.

Once you've created your initial material, Publisher's powerful customisation tools help you tailor your marketing material to your own business image. For example, you can easily change your fonts using a font scheme, i.e. professionally paired headline and copy fonts. Otherwise, create a unique look by selecting a different colour scheme or designing a custom one for yourself.

With the latest versions of Publisher it couldn’t be easier to create your own small website to reflect your company image. Publisher 2003 comes with improvements like Web Site Wizards to make it easy for you to build a marketing web site, and the new Email Wizard that helps you to create email marketing campaigns that will be read across a wide variety of email packages. Publisher comes with built-in support for more than 20 new web page types.

Each new version of Publisher has expanded your ability to produce competitive marketing and communications materials in-house. The latest versions, Publisher 2002 and 2003, come with many of the familiar Office XP productivity features, including convenient Task Panes that offer visual previews of your design choices.

Publisher 2002 and 2003 offer additional commercial printing options for those times when you wish to have your material professionally printed. The powerful Pack and Go wizard makes preparing your work for the printers a breeze and alerts you to problems like the need to embed fonts before you leave your desk - a costly affair if only discovered once at the print shop!

And support for CMYK Composite PostScript in Publisher 2003 makes it easier to professionally print your Publisher files for those higher quality and larger quantity print jobs.

If you already own Publisher and would like to download additional templates or download updates to your current version, you can do so at the Template Gallery.

What next?

The best way to see if Publisher 2003 is right for your business is to give it a go. You can get a 60-day free trial of Microsoft Office 2003, which includes Publisher.

Get FREE Microsoft Office training on Small Business+. Learn when you want and at your own pace! To start a course, simply sign up here.

You can also get more information about the other Office System programs.


Sign into Microsoft Small Business+ for free web-based training and software support.

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