As designers, we would never recall of actually "designing" anything in Microsoft Discussion — that'due south what InDesign is for! Yet certain assets like presentation templates and letterheads need to be easily editable past our clients and we cannot expect them to be familiar with tools that we may use every day.

For such projects, I personally prefer starting with tools that I know volition grant me artistic liberty and ease of apply, despite knowing that the final blueprint volition ultimately need to be recreated in Microsoft Discussion. We've already written about how the tools we use can bear on the quality and style of our work, and then I like to ensure that nothing is compromised based on medium.

Want to skip my yapping and jump to the solution?

The Problem

We recently created a letterhead which featured a dissimilar header and margins on the first page. After blueprint approval, our task was to create a single-folio Word template that would automatically utilize the correct styling if the content exceeded one page. Now, I'k not throwing shade at Microsoft Give-and-take — information technology is a powerful word processor. The upshot is that certain use cases that may be common in a design project are unaccounted for or unintuitive at best.

Discussion uses section breaks to apply unlike page layouts to different parts of a document, merely section breaks can exist a nightmare to use properly off the bat. See kids, what they don't teach you at school is that a section suspension defines the mode for the content preceding it. What? Aye, that is right. So if yous delete a section, the content upwardly to that section will adopt styling from the department after the now departed department break.

Me: "Bully, I finally accept that figured out. And then I'll just add a section break at the end of folio one and everything will be fine, right?"
Life: "NOPE!"

The existent trouble is that there is no manner to lock a section break. Then even if I created a certificate with a blank second page and sections properly defined, the section break volition exist pushed down the folio every bit the finish user begins to type. Therefore, instead of your section starting after the end of the first page, information technology will ever start after the end of the content. No bueno.

The Solution

After searching all corners of the internet and reaching a state of pure delirium, I came across this guide, written by Ms. Suzanne Due south. Barnhill, I believe effectually… a decade agone. I owe this lady my sanity.

It'due south fairly straightforward in Word to create a different header and footer for the starting time page of a document — that they decided to make a toggle. Locking department breaks? Non so much. Luckily, only the acme and bottom margins were different on the first page in my pattern. Following the guide, I first created the header and footer for the remainder of the certificate, not the commencement page. And so, toggling the unlike get-go page toggle, I created the header for the first folio.

This is where the magic happens. I ended up using the height of the first page header without having to get into using sections at all! If your header is live text, you tin add line breaks until you attain the desired height — hacky, I know. If information technology's in an prototype, yous can add a bottom margin to your image using the Size and Position dialog for that paradigm — nonetheless hacky, but less and then.

In the end, I finally had a document that starts equally a single page with the right first page header, and automatically applies the regular header to all pages subsequent pages if the content exceeds the first page.

Parting Words of Advice

If you find yourself in a like, admitting very specific pickle, then I hope this guide saves you similar Suzanne's saved me. Only the greater moral of this story of survival is that I'm glad I didn't create a design based on the ease of its reproducibility in Word. The time and effort spent on recreating and getting the functionality right was, and is always worth knowing that the final product addresses the client'due south needs, and is ane that nosotros are proud of.