Office 2011 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Moving Beyond Text: Publishing Layout View

If you want to drop a picture or two into a document that’s mostly text, you can go ahead and use Home | Insert→Photo. But when you have grander page layout plans with lots of pictures, multiple columns, text boxes and splashes of color, turn to the Publishing Layout view. By starting with one of dozens of professionally-designed templates, you can plug in your own text and pictures and have a polished document in a record time. You can change as much or as little about the templates as you choose to—or start with a completely blank page.

Starting with a Template: Ready-to-Use Page Designs

The best way to work with Print Layout view is to start with a new document from a template. Click New from Template on the toolbar. When the Word Document Gallery opens as shown in Figure 7-1, scroll down to the templates under Publishing Layout view. You’ll find about a hundred well-designed documents for newsletters, pamphlets, posters, signs and even things like CD covers. Sure you could use Word to create your own design from scratch, but if you’re in that business, you probably already have Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress on your Mac. Word’s Publishing Layout view is a tool for the part-time page artist rather than the pro. It fills in the gap between Word and those full-blown publishing tools that cost as much as a new Mac.

It’s best to think of Publishing Layout view as a separate program from Word, rather than just a different view. You ...