Free Word Templates

Free Word Templates are not as easy to find as text based templates. We have included 1 word template in word native format i our template package.

Remember that templates are, just templates!

They will give you a starting point, but you will have to change content as well as the formatting of the dontent and in many cases the formatting of the template itself.

This to make it work for you.

Read more about template and newsletter formatting here.

Little known problems

What might be overlooked are the problems that comes with choosing word for templating.

To learn how to best handle word templates for newsletters take a look at this instruction video showing how to create a newsletter in Microsoft Word 2007. When using free word templates, or any office template. Remember to check what personal information is stored in it when you release it to the public.

Microsoft Word Formats

Using microsoft words native format will you have problems between versions (Office 95, Office 97 and so on).

Saving the templates (or documents) as html will create something that may look more or less the way you wanted when you watch it in a browser. But be warned, trying to edit it as html with an html editor is not that easy.

Some html editors even have special cleaning options for html code produced by word.

You could try to use save as and choose office 95 compatability, but if you use Office 2003 will you see that there are quite many nice formating features that go lost when reverting to the oldest office format.

So what you have left is saving your template as an rtf file. This is most likely the most compatible source format you can use (not xml as no older editors and similar support it).

But even so will you probably run into problems.

Sending Word Documents as Attachements

Once you reach the moment when you use your free word templates for mailouts, are there no good way to send the formated document directly inside an email. You only option to make a good use of you rned free word template would be to send it as an attachement.

And if the antivirus programs on internet doesn’t eat your mail, will it most likely have problems when arriving to its destination (as a word document can contain scripts, will most modern email software’s refuse to let it in). And if you get past that, then the format woul dhave to be compatible as well.

You probably understand by now that I find word to be to difficult to use for email newsletters and ezines. It might work well for certain groups, but most likely will the problems be to many for “normal people” not being used to all the special things needed to use attachements.

Another Way to Do It!

Another solution that is quite neat actually is to make a good looking newsletter in word (they can be made absolutely 100% good looking) using home made layouts or one of the many free word templates on the net, and then save it (actually most often printed to pdf) as a PDF file.

Then you mail out only a link to where they can get it (and download it).

However, you say, can’t that be done with a word document. Sure, but you will not have the platform support a PDF file has. Windows, Mac, UNIX, Linux and so on will be able to download and read your PDF version (but not as easy with your word version).

Little Know Email Vs Word FOrmatting Problem

It's not commonly known that Outlook and outlook express may use word (if present) as the default text editor. This means that when using html as the default newsletter format, the email sent is made up from the quite messy word html code. You may hear people you have sent these email to, complain about how weird they look. Here's a great video explaining this and how you can fix the problem of strange email formatting with outlook.

Templates for download