Office Ready Professional
The first program I purchased fromTemplate Zone (www.templatezone.com) a few years ago. I purchased the Platinum edition for around $150, and I still love it. The program is an add-on for Microsoft Office and integrates seamlessly with Word, Excel & Power Point. The wonderful design team have created incredible, stunning templates that are quick and simple to edit.The first thing you need to do once you have installed the program is set up a company profile. This profile stores your company logo, address, telephone and fax numbers, tag lines - all the basic information that you need to include on all documents.
You then are faced with the decision of what to do next. By default, the program shows you the range of Word templates in an amazing gallery of ideas (see screenshot below), all designs are divided into categories to make things easier for you. Choose between flyers, reports, brochures, newsletters and more. Hard part ... hmm ... which one to use? Don't want to create a document in Word - OK ... choose Excel and you are faced with more templates that are divided into easy to browse categories. Choose from Business or Project Management, Finance, and even more. If that's not enough for you, then try Power Point templates, each template design shows the master title slide and the main section slides, all of which can be easily edited.
750 Design templates included
In all, the platinum version offers over 750 different designs! Still not enough? You can always purchase and download more templates from the template store. These additional templates are again divided into categories, so by purchasing an "expansion pack" you get more than one type of design per category.
Inbuilt Image Editor
Office Ready includes an easy to use Image Editor, each of their templates includes sample images that you can edit, change colour, or swap for your own images. To access the Image Editor, simply double click on the smiley face that indicates a photo socket.
To crop the image, simply move the red box around the image, you can resize if required.There are many other options available here also. You can choose to adjust the brightness, contrast, hue & saturation of the image, apply rotation, and more.
The text on the template is simply in good old text boxes and is easily editable.
PDF Round Trip
One main reason I purchased this program was for the PDF round-trip. At the time of purchase, there was no easy way to convert Word documents into PDF, you had to use an expensive program such as Adobe PDF maker to create PDF files.
But Office Professional does much more than simply CONVERT your documents to PDF, it can go the other way also and convert PDF documents to Word! Wonderful idea and has saved me endless amounts of trouble.
Other features
There are many other great features of the program, such as the Colour Themes and Mail Merge options, as well as a direct link to Printing for Less.
The Colour Themes allow you to quickly change the colour scheme of your documents, for example if you need to have your company colours on your documents, you can create your own theme and then apply it to your documents. The colour theme controls the colour of text, headings, text boxes, shapes and more.
The Mail Merge option allows you to manage your mailing lists directly with the program that allows you to send the document you have made directly to your customers.
Warning
One thing I found with the program that being designed in the USA, the templates have been developed for that area and use the LETTER page layout. If you are using a different type of paper such as A4 in Australia, you will need to change the page layout to comply before printing your document. Once you do this though, the objects on the page will shift their location accordingly. I've found it much easier to adjust the page layout to A4 before I start any major editing on the document.With the brochures, I have also found that the do not print nicely (as you would expect) with back to back printing. One side always seems to be slightly to the side - although this could also be a problem with my cheap horrible HP printer that I am waiting to die so I have an excuse to replace it (but what do you expect for $30). I have found that it is best if using a brochure design, to copy the groups of elements and paste into Publisher and then continue editing the document.
