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Here's the opening pages of Creative Certificates with Word - Premium edition:

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Use Word for Certificates

Well, why not use Word?  You already have Microsoft Word on your computer so there’s no point in paying money for another program if you don’t need it.  On top of that you’d have to learn how to use the new program.

Word documents are well known around the world, and you can email a certificate to someone else knowing that the receiver will very likely be able to open and use it without any trouble.

We’ve written this e-book for people who have Word and have the occasional need to make a certificate for home or work.

You can do amazing things - all done in Microsoft Word – we’ll show you how to do that and more.

In the end you’ll be able to quickly produce great certificates that will make people ask:

“How did you do that”

and they may find it hard to believe that you did it in Microsoft Word.

This ebook was inspired, in part, by seeing a friend get this uninspiring certificate after a week long course:

All the one font, large and centered.   Not really anything that people would appreciate receiving at the end of a course.

After reading this e-book you’ll be able to convert that certificate into this:

The same words but with better formatting, a border, ‘star’ effect, clipart and a place for the company logo.

That’s all done in Word as you get it from Microsoft – no fancy extras required

We’ll show you how to make that certificate and give you the Word document with that design all ready for you to use.

Creative Certificates with Word isn’t about one certificate design, but a range of document styles.  We’ll show you, step-by-step, how to make this great certificate.

Not only are there step-by-step instructions (from blank page to completed document) but the certificate (as a Word document) is included in the Certificate Gallery that comes with the ebook.

Better certificates are appreciated and worth the trouble to make. People will feel properly recognized if they get a well designed certificate which looks and feels like it was professionally made with care and attention.

A certificate is a curious document because, unlike most things you make in Word, the FEEL counts as well.  A nice looking certificate can lose its appeal to the receiver if they are handed a flimsy piece of paper.  That’s why we spend some time talking about the type of paper you use, as well as what you put on the paper.

Some certificates also serve a purpose as signage.  ‘Certificates of appreciation’ you see in stores which support a charity or school, these should have the name of the issuer and recipient more prominent than usual so they work when up on a wall to be seen by customers

What’s inside

First we’ll take you step-by-step through making a simple but effective certificate in Word – from a blank page to finished document.  You’ll discover some of the great formatting tricks that the experts use in Word.  There’s a copy of the final document in the attached Certificate Gallery.

Then we’ll look at the important selection of paper.  What’s a ‘heavy’ paper, textured paper, the acid-free option, cheaper glossy paper plus speciality papers, frames and covers.

There’s an entire chapter on fonts, useful effects to change the look of the fonts you have and some recommendations for pairs of fonts that work together for the heading and the subtext of a sign. 

We’ll look at the important options for a page background, taking you through all the choices in Microsoft Word.  Finally a step-by-step guide to adding the free clipart available to all Microsoft Office customers.

There’s advice on:

• The paper to choose for the best effect
• Suitable color combinations – which colors work together
• Easy to find symbols you already have on your computer
• A source of hundreds of simple graphics that you probably have on your computer but don’t realize it.
• When to choose Portrait or Landscape page orientation

Certificate Gallery

We know that your time is precious, so this ebook includes certificates that are ready for you to print out and use.

The Certificate Gallery is a collection of pre-made certificates as Word documents ready for you to edit and use yourself.  They’ll give you a massive head start in making many types of signs – you might not have to do anything at all, just print it out!

There are four quite different example certificates in the standard edition of Creative Certificates with Word.

• Certificate with sunset
• Membership Fun
• Product Sales
• Religious

There are 20 more documents in the Premium edition of the ebook with professionally made designs.

Flexibility

Some certificate examples you can download have unchangeable formatting and fixed text.

Our examples are quite different – we give you the certificates to change to suit your needs, in fact we encourage you to alter them!

All the document elements are available for you to change; wording, color, style, clipart, background … the lot.

To prove that, we’ve included (in the Premium edition) some ‘variations’ examples – transformations of a fully formed certificate to show how it can be altered to look quite different and be used for an entirely different purpose.

Premium Edition

The Premium Edition of Creative Certificates with Word has many more example documents, variations, resources plus an entire extra chapter.

There are 16 more professionally designed templates included in the Certificate Gallery.  Plus four ‘variations’, examples of how one of the templates made by Maryjane can be tweaked to suit a variety of different needs.

A total of 24 certificates examples to give you a hard start on making a great document.  It’ll save you a lot of time and trouble as well as letting you print great looking certificates.

There are plenty of sites where you can find templates, backgrounds, textures, images and fonts that you can use.  Many of those sites have a bewildering range of choices, so we don’t just give you a link. Maryjane has gone through the sites, selected some of the better possibilities and explained why and how to use them in your certificates.

There are more free font selections to download plus some suggested combinations of fonts that will look good on your certificates.

The full size gallery of Page Borders available in Word 2003 is in the Premium edition as an appendix.

Ebook power

This is an electronic book so you have options with this that you don’t have with dead tree (paper) publications.

Being an Adobe Acrobat book you can navigate using the bookmarks pane on the left to jump around the e-book, being a more convenient and faster version of the traditional table of contents (but we’ve still included a TOC below)

Searching.  Use the Find or Search commands (under the Edit menu) in the Acrobat Reader to quickly locate what you need.

Searching.  Naturally this handbook can be indexed and searched by any Desktop Searching program that indexes the content of PDF files. Just save it to a folder that is indexed and the Desktop Searching program should do the rest.   There’s lots more detail about this in our Desktop Search Handbook.

Bookmarks.  Choose View | Navigation Tabs | Bookmarks to see a tree view of the headings in the handbook. Click on any heading to jump to that section.

Updates.  Unlike a paper book, registered purchasers get free updates to the entire book. As new and upgraded programs appear we’ll update the handbook. We’ll let you know via Office Watch newsletters during 2006.

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