Got a weird thing to show you, so tell all the boys and girls

[venta]

Once upon a time, there was a dance team that wanted a flyer. A nice, A4, tri-fold flyer. Dr Fiona heroically tackled it. Then she said sod this, Word is a fair bugger, I cannot get the columns to line up nicely on both sides of the paper.

Haha, I thought, I am so very clever, I will use a downloadable tri-fold flyer template from Office Online. And lo, I did, and it was also a fair bugger because it is completely un-customisable. You want three folds? Well, some of it will be bright orange. No other colour is available. Just bright orange.

After an awful lot of fiddling about, I finally had something I was at least not-unhappy with. And then I printed out a trial run, and it turns out the US-centric world of Office Online makes its tri-fold flyer templates for Letter sized paper. Not A4. Which I had not checked. I am, in fact, not so very clever after all. I imagine the template can be tweaked, but then it's back to the original problem of getting columns to line up manually. I haven't even successfully worked out how to get three evenly-spaced columns yet :( I've never liked Word.

Does anyone have... a tri-fold A4 template, a better knowledge of Word than I have, a burning desire to show off their graphic-design skills, or a large bottle of gin[*]?

Any assistance greatly appreciated.

Edit Or, of course, does anyone have a source of Letter paper, a colour/duplex printer that will handle it, and a generic willingness to assist in exchange for cake? (I have never owned a printer, I have no idea if they mostly do Letter...)

[*] Not strictly relevant, but I might stop caring about the flyer...

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

If you are using Word 2007 I have just got a closer approximation to what you describe...

For template: go to Brochures & Booklets --> Brochures --> second line down on the left.

To make it A4 not letter: go to Page Layout tab at the top --> click on pictogram called "Size" --> select A4. Need to do this for every page in the document. Will create new blank pages but you can delete them.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That was all going well, but then the template it downloaded seems to open in Publisher (which may be fine, I'm just even less familiar with it). When I tried to restrict it to Word 2007 templates, all the tri-fold brochure ones disappeared.

Thank you for the suggestion, but I don't seem to have done a good job of following it. How did you get to the templates? I've tried two different routes, each of which seems to show me different selections...

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I went:
-click on the Windows-squares pictogram in the round button at the top left that brings up the New, Open, ... options.
-click on New. Window called "New Document" pops up.
-Under Templates on the left it reads like this:
Blank and recent
Installed Templates
My templates...
New from existing...
Microsoft Office Online
Featured
Access databases
Agendas
Books
Brochures and booklets
...

-Click on Brochures and booklets and in the middle pops up three categories: Brochures, Catalogs, Programs. Click on Brochures.
-Grid of pictures of leaflets pops up, click on that one, click on Download button on bottom right.
-Template opens as a new document in Word. It has [compatibility mode] in the bar at the top and I've never figured out what this means.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you very much for typing all that out. That is a different (third) way and appears to offer different options. I have faffed too much at work today already, so will have to postpone trying that template out til later but it does look more promising. The other one went all wonky and lopsided if you tried to change the paper size.

I think the [compatibility mode] thing is a reference to it being a .doc document. Word 2007 went all .docx, but maintained support for .doc to keep compatibility with older versions of Word. So I think it's just telling that it's doing that, and that older versions of Word will be able to open the resulting document.