Christmas and New Year are around the corner, and if you like DIY projects, you can try something different this year; how about creating personalized greeting cards for your love ones?
There are many paid and free software that you can find to do this, but the thing is that there is a good chance that you already have all the software you need for this kind of project. In this How-To guide you are going to learn how to create beautiful personalized holiday greeting cards using Microsoft Word 2010, easily and quickly — just keep in mind that you can use the same concept to do this in previous version of Word as well.
Follow these steps to create a holiday greeting card in Word
1. Open Microsoft Word 2010, click on File and then New.
2. From the Office.com Templates section, click on Cards. And then click on Holiday Cards — Note that you can also use the search box to look for different templates using keywords.
3. What is great about Office.com is that they have many free templates for almost any occasion, so you can come back later on the year and create different type of cards (e.g., birthdays, thank you, postcards, get well, etc.) Now click one of the template to select, then a preview will appear on the right side of your screen. Once you made your choice, click the Download button and a new Word document will open with the new template.
4. Now it is time for the editing and making the greeting card personalized and special. You’ll notice that the template is on landscape mode and it comes with two pages: the first page contains the front and back part of the card and as you might have guessed the second page is where the main message is going to be printed. Note that any aspect of the card can be customized to your likes; the font, color, text, images, etc.
- In the case you like the style of the greeting card, but you don’t like the image that came with it, you can easily left-click on the image, then do a right-click, from the menu select Change Pictures, browse for a new image (this can be a funny image or a picture that has a special moment that you would like to share), select and click Insert.
- Also you can find more holiday related images by navigating through, Insert, clicking on Clip Art and doing a search for: “greeting card”, “Christmas”, “New Year”, etc. Then just click the image and it will load in the document.
What it could be difficult is to find out what to say. One thing you can do in this situation is to resource to the almighty of search, Google, and type for example, “greeting card phrases for Christmas” or “greeting card phrases for New Year”, and you’ll find tons of web pages with great things to say in Christmas and New Year. But, of course, it is always best that you come out with a good line.
5. When you are done editing, go to File and Save the document.
How to print a greeting card
Printing greeting cards from your computer can be a little bit tricky, so here are the steps to get the print right at the first time.
Oh! One more thing, at the time to print, you could use standard paper, but greeting cards look much better when they are printed with the right paper, like with Hallmark Blank Cards Half-fold Matte
1. Add a blank card paper to the printer
2. While in Microsoft Word 2010, go to File and click Print.
3. From the print stage area, make sure that you are:
- Printing only 1 copy
- Selecting the right printer
- Under the Pages filed, selecting Manually Print on Both Sides and NOT the Print One Sided option.
.4. Hit the Print button on the top, when you do this Word is going to print only the first page and you’ll be prompted the following warning: “Please remove the printout of first side from tray and place it in the input bin. Then press OK to continue printing.”
Now, carefully take the printout of the tray and without flipping or rotating insert it back in the input tray. Go back to the computer and click the OK button to finish printing.
As you can see creating holiday greeting cards can be a fun project for the holiday season, plus you can add a more personal touch on each card. And you may find out that using Microsoft Word for this DIY, you won’t have to spend extra money on software that does the same job, and if you have many family members and friends you can save some money there as well.
Also a greeting card can be perfect to attach a gift card to it — here is an idea: why not to give as a present an Amazon.com Gift Cards
Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 15 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 21 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me. Email him at [email protected].