Formatting in Word – The One Thing They Don’t Teach You in Design School

And really, should they? Really? Margins shift, fonts aren’t imbedded, bleeds don’t exist, and while you spend much longer struggling to produce quality work than you would in the wonderful and easy world of Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Word will still manage to make the end result look amateur. While designers can play the Almighty Creator in the world of Adobe (or Quark, Corel, or whatever program you prefer), move on to Word and suddenly all control is lost. Or at the very least, limited.

But as much as we may have been told in design school to never, ever format in Word, it comes up in the work world all the time. It’s a reality. And the reasons actually make a ton of sense. Clients want control of their own content, and they aren’t always printing information on a pre-printed letterhead. A lot of the time, they are just sending files via email. In a way, Word seems like the CMS program of the non-website world, where design templates are created and clients can manipulate content. It’s a universal program —personally I love it for novel writing, hate it for design—but it’s convenient for people who are not designers themselves. It makes sense. And as much as it may make us Graphic Designers squirm, we need to be able to provide this service to clients from time to time in order to make their lives easier.

To set the record straight, I’m not in any way advocating a revolution in design using Microsoft Word. InDesign (and Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark etc) are a million times better, they were created for a reason, and hopefully 99% of the time we can rely on these programs for output. But when you don’t have the choice, it’s great to have some resources on how to tackle Word in the most efficient way possible. I am still learning the best way to do this – keeping true to the InDesign version as much as possible, with a small file size and hopefully no chance of things shifting when the client opens the file on their end. I came across a great article online of someone who shares in the angst yet has some great solutions. Check out the link below, and empower yourself for the next time you have to format in Word instead of a professional design program!

Link: http://www.creativepro.com/article/hergeekness-says-convert-custom-letterhead-microsoft-word-templates