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

[shui-long.livejournal.com]

Ditch [expletive deleted] Word and use something fit for the purpose, i.e. a DTP program. Without necessarily spending money on it, either - the learning curve for Scribus is probably a bit steep, but there are free versions of Serif PagePlus available which should be able to do the job.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that Word is probably not the best tool for the job. The Microsoft Office tool is Publisher, which is included with Office Professional.

[venta.livejournal.com]

The thing about steep learning curves is that last-minute jobs that you've forgotten about is not the time to take them on :)

I also made the mistake of thinking that - since there was an official Office template for what I wanted to do - it would be quick and easy in Word.

What format does one normally get out of a DTP package? Do they all have their own proprietary ones? Bear in mind I'll always have to send the output to a selection of quite not-computer-literate people (though I guess I can probably always print-to-PDF and send them that...)

[shui-long.livejournal.com]

I certainly wouldn't tackle the learning curve for Scribus with a last-minute job - but I think PagePlus is a lot more novice-friendly (even if less powerful). I'm fairly sure there's an A4 tri-fold leaflet template in the PagePlus starter version.

Pdf is the de facto standard for commercial printers, and any reasonable DTP program will be able to produce pdf output - though, as you'd expect, each commercial DTP program uses its own proprietary file format to store documents.