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

[uitlander]

Could you use a colour photocopier to enlarge your flyer to the required size?

Or print as PDF and ask the printers to adjust the scale.

Just a thought...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Could you use a colour photocopier to enlarge your flyer to the required size?

Possibly one could :) I have neither a colour photocopier nor the requisite ability to use it, unfortunately.

I suspect both the scaling options would still need the original document to make some sensible choices about where its "fold" lines were going to be - maybe it'd all just work from the existing dodgy doc, and maybe not. I'm afraid once things get off a screen and onto paper I'm operating way outside of my sphere of knowledge!

So it is probably a useful thought, to someone who isn't me, and thank you.

ask the printers

Printers? Dance teams clearly aren't as rich as you think! Or you know some much cheaper printers than we do... Last time we did some flyers we got a quote from a printer, then we giggled a lot and all decided to print out as many as we thought we could get away with on our employers' printers...

[uitlander]

I see. In this paradigm I suppose words like Quark Express, FrameMaker and InDesign as more appropriate tools also don't figure :-(

[venta.livejournal.com]

Am I just being a skinflint? Does any private individual who has to do very, very occasional bits of designwork have these tools?

[uitlander]

No, at £500ish a seat you're not being a skinflint. It's just a shame you don't have access to any of the above via work. Word isn't the nicest of things to tame for this sort of task.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I imagine the people who do this kind of thing at work anyway would have a very different approach. I really am a rank amateur in the design/DTP/Office-use stakes, having never had to do anything of the sort professionally :)

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Quark? (Puts up crossed forefingers to ward off evil). Come on, you must have learned most of the arrangements of curses you know from me when we went off hot metal