How to Write a Newsletter Using Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 has a suite of great tools that can be used for a number of things. Even Microsoft Word 2010 can be used for more than just letters, faxes, essays, and reports. If you know what tools to use, you can even use the word processor to create newsletters. This tutorial will give you the basic steps to creating a newsletter using Word 2010.

Learn Microsoft Office 2010

How to Create a Newsletter Using Word 2010

Open Microsoft Word 2010 by clicking on the icon on your desktop (Windows XP, Vista, 7) or start screen (Windows 8). Word will open a completely blank document. If you wanted to, you could create a newsletter in that document, but as Word comes with tools to make everything easier for us, we’re going to take advantage of those tools. Ignore that blank document, and click on the file tab. It will open a tab that looks similar to the one below.

Click on the item marked “New,” and this will open up a whole bunch of new options for you. It will look similar to the photo below.

Click on the icon marked “Sample Templates”, and Word will list all of the templates available that came installed with your program. These are created by the people at Microsoft, and there aren’t very many. However, they do have a few newsletters available. These are squared in red on the image below.

Don’t worry if you don’t like how the newsletters look. You can customize them to your specifications as soon as you pick one. The Apothecary Newsletter was chosen for this tutorial. When you click on the newsletter, it will open two pages. Note that if you chose a different newsletter template, it might open a different amount of page numbers.

Now, let’s start with the customization first since the content will be what you will write on your own time. Perhaps you’re wondering how you can change those shapes in the newsletter to a different color. Just click on the shape, and a new tab will pop up at the end of your toolbar entitled “Drawing Tools”. Underneath “Drawing Tools”, it will say “Format”.

Click on that tab to open a bunch of tools designed specifically for the shapes. You will have to change each shape manually as the changes will only occur to the shape you’re clicking on. To change the color, you’re going to click on the tool entitled “Shape Fill”, marked in red on the image below.

If your shape has a colored shape outline, you can find that tool directly beneath “Shape Fill”. If you don’t want to worry about the color of the shape’s outline, just click on “No Outline” when you open the “Shape Outline” tool. You can change the size of the shapes as well if you need to.

Learn Microsoft Word 2013

Now, this template has been separated into numerous, easy textboxes for you. However, you might find that your newsletter might be longer than two pages. A good rule of thumb is to keep it no longer than three pages so let’s take a look at adding another page to the newsletter. As you can see, this newsletter already comes with an area for adding postage on the second page. You can easily add a page by clicking beneath “Story Subtitle or summary” on the front page. Then click on the “Insert” tab, and click on “Page Break”.

It should leave your newsletter looking like the pictures below.

From these photos, you can see that the text boxes were removed from the first and last page. If you like, you can drag and drop the textbox from the second page back onto the first page, but if you do that, you’ll end up with a fourth page between the second and last page that is completely empty. You can delete it by removing the page break from that page.

Learn Microsoft Office 2010 from Pearson

This will move the text boxes “Story Title” and “Story Subtitle or summary” from the second page to the third page, but you can easily drag and drop them back to the second page. If you copy text from any of the precreated text boxes in the newsletter, you can add another textbox onto the third page so your newsletter will look a little something like the pictures below.

Once you’ve typed in all the text you want, you can print out the newsletter to send out in the mail. If you want to email the newsletter, click on the “File” tab, and go down to “Save & Send”, which will open a new tab that looks like the one below.

Your best bet is to send it as a PDF because Adobe Reader is free to download, and most computers now come with it installed. This way people who don’t have Microsoft Word 2010 can still view your newsletter.

Learn Microsoft Office 2010 with this training tutorial!