Publishing has a long history of being a very expensive and elitist endeavour that was often financed by the very rich and influential. The high-tech revolution, however, has made publishing easy for anyone.

A computer with an Internet connection can easily produce an array of professional-quality products. An advisor and his or her team can create client letters, newsletters, flyers, business cards, PowerPoint presentations, promotions and folders with little effort or expense.

The key to self-publishing is templates, which are fixed moulds of pages that can be created and then altered and reused.

Personal publishing has become so popular in the past few years that it has spawned an entire cottage industry of online template designers. If you’re looking for any type of document, from distinguished business letterhead to fancy invitations, there are thousands of templates for the choosing on the Internet.

Advisors with Web sites or newsletters may even want to pass the design sites along to their clients, who can use them for personal stationery, holiday cards or invitations.

Here’s a look at the best template offerings:



Microsoft template gallery

http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/templates/default.aspx

Bill Gates didn’t become crazy rich by missing opportunities. Microsoft Corp. has long been aware that it must cater to its customers on many levels to remain a dominant force. To that end, it offers an extensive and ever-expanding gallery of very useful templates.

There are more than 60 categories, including templates to produce agendas, brochures, budgets, business cards, calendars, expense reports, flyers, letters, memos, newsletters, presentations, work schedules and resumés.

Each category offers dozens of examples. Browse through the models and then download whatever suits your tastes. You and your team can then personalize the mould to match your requirements and print out copies.

Many of the templates can immediately add some organization and higher standards to everyday communications with clients and within the firm.

Memo templates are a good example. Microsoft offers about a dozen templates for anyone who wants to send a professionally formatted note to clients or the boss or who is tired of scratching out “sticky notes” to colleagues. There are very basic memo templates, credit memos and flashier pages that include your letterhead and company name and address and are marked “confidential.”

Schedule templates may also prove useful. There are formats for employee work schedules, worker absenteeism, weekly personal planners, full-year event planners and even personal planners covering items such as scheduled auto repairs, household chores and homework.

Microsoft has made the gallery interactive. Visitors rate each of the templates, which helps when you are browsing, and there are a number of forums in which template users discuss benefits and drawbacks — and even create new templates that are posted on the site for everyone.

The gallery ranks the templates by user rating and the number of times that they have been downloaded. The “Top 25” list includes formats for family monthly budgets, fax cover sheets, mailing labels, various resumé styles and cover-letter pages for mail sent out to clients.

Business presentations designed for PowerPoint are also a popular download, and all have received very favourable ratings by users. The top download in the category is “business plan presentation,” which requires a PowerPoint 97 version or later. It has been downloaded by about 420,000 people and rates four stars out of five. Not far behind are PowerPoint presentations for financial performance, marketing plans, strategies and product overviews.



Avery Dennison Corp.

www.avery.com

California-based Avery is one of the world’s largest makers of desktop publishing products, including self-adhesive labels, business cards and report files. It deals with Microsoft on a number of templates, but its own Web site should appeal to an even wider audience.

Apart from offering a vast range of templates, the site provides business people with tips on how to hold effective meetings and make full use of templates in presentations or newsletters. There are short articles, for example, on how to brainstorm ideas for meetings, a list of items necessary for a successful meeting, how to design an efficient agenda and advice for speaking more effectively.

If you really want to get organized at work and home, download the Avery Wizard 3.0 from the home page. This gizmo automatically integrates itself into the Microsoft Word software on your computer and imports lists from Microsoft Excel, Outlook Express and other databases. As a result, you and your team can merge all of your mail, allowing you to automatically personalize a document that goes to all of our clients — in one shot. It also includes a database of Avery templates that works itself into your computer for future use. You can also design business cards, CD or DVD labels and greeting cards or invitations.

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Desktop publishing tips

http://desktoppub.about.com

If you want to go beyond simple templates and learn more about overall desktop publishing, you can pick up good tips at about.-com, a Web site owned by The New York Times that gets about 30 million visitors a month. The site is unique in that it employs about 500 experts in various fields.

The desktop advice area of the site offers dozens of articles, including how to perfect your projects, finding templates, using fonts and photographs, recommendations for desktop software and things to avoid when creating documents. There is even a free weekly e-mail that offers updates on the latest tricks and developments. IE



If you have Web sites to share with IE readers, e-mail Glenn Flanagan at gflanagan@sympatico.ca.