Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Creating an E-mail Newsletter

One of the best ways to keep in touch with your clients, customers, parishioners, students, and whomever you need to correspond with is to regularly send out something of value.

While you could easily use the features of Word as your e-mail editor to create a newsletter for this purpose, I decided to venture back into what is probably the best tool for the job: Microsoft Publisher.

I was amazed when I decided to explore Publisher for this task, because right in the opening screen is an entire gallery of Publisher E-mail templates geared to guess what – creating a newsletter.

Figure 523

I selected a template and then filled in my personal information, which Publisher puts into all of the right slots for me, and formats according to the pretty design.

Figure 524 The next thing I did was to delete their placeholder "Organization" logo, and replace it with my own. Since my logo points to the right, I moved the main titles of the newsletter over to the right first.

Then I clicked Insert > Picture > From File, and chose my logo, inserting it into the top of the newsletter template. I had to resize it to make it fit, by dragging in a corner of its selection handles.

Figure 525

Now, if you're used to working with graphics, you know about this stuff, but maybe you're not that comfortable. As I began to move placeholders, they got misaligned.

To fix this, I selected two of the placeholders together by holding down the Shift key, and then clicked Arrange > Align or Distribute > Align Center to get them back where they belonged.

Figure 526

A similar selection technique allowed me to replace the text. I highlighted the text in the main placeholder for Newsletter Title...

Figure 527

And replaced it with my snappy new title, "Power-Pointers."

Figure 528

Since I didn't want to go blind doing this project, I clicked the View drop-down list, and chose a 100% actual view of the page. That meant I needed to scroll down, but I ccould see what I was doing and what the reader will finally see. I could continue to revise the newsletter by typing or pasting in my own material.

Figure 529

Then came the hard part, which is creating content. If you're like me, you'll quickly decide that copying and pasting stuff from other sources is the way to go.

But what happens if you do that with the wrong sized font? Yuck. The stuff in the placeholders begins to look lousy. So how do you keep it all consistent?

The Old Notepad Trick

Since I am blessed with a dual screen display setup – see my article on using Presenter View for how to do this – I can keep MS Notepad open on the other display, and copy and paste whatever I want to use in the newsletter into Notepad first.

By then pasting it into the placeholder of the newsletter template, I have stripped out the original formatting. It takes on the uniform look of the newsletter.

Figure 30

I use this technique in other places too, such as when I want to use text in a PowerPoint slide but don't want the Word formatting to accompany it.

Editing Hyperlinks

The really cool thing about an e-mail newsletter sent in HTML format is that within it you can create hyperlinks to your own Web site, or to other areas of interest.

Once again, you highlight the More Details hyperlink in the template, right-click, select Hyperlink, and paste the link directly into the dialog box.

Figure 531

Before we're ready to publish this as e-mail message, there is one annoying aspect to take care of. We scroll to the bottom, where we would expect our personal information to be filled in properly by the template, but it isn't!

I went through various Help scenarios, including clicking on Update in the Personal Information window, and nothing seemed to work.

I ended up deleting the text box that is supplied by the template. Instead, I used Insert > Personal Information > Phone/Fax/E-mail. An alternative is to edit the items in the template with your own information, which of course makes filling in the Personal Information window useless.

Figure 532

Okay, so we've revised the template and added our content. We need to save the newletter in the Publisher *.pub format for reuse later on, and for our own protection.

We can also save it as a Web page – including in the MHT single file format we've covered in another recent update.

Figure 533

But now we're ready. Click File > Send E-mail > E-mail preview to see how your brilliant prose will look when sent by Outlook or Outlook Express. We preview it in our Web browser.

Figure 534

We have two options. The first is to save it as an attachment and open the E-mail client with a message ready to send out.

Figure 535

The other is to Send This Pages as a Message which gives you an e-mail Send to capability with your E-mail address book. This puts the newsletter where you probably really want it, in the message body.

Figure 536

You probably don't want to send the newsletter out individually. Most likely, you will want to create a Distribution List in your Outlook Address Book first. We also covered that in a previous update.

So there you have it. In Microsoft Publisher you can create an e-mail newsletter in about an hour.

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