Make snazzy Office documents the easy way

Launch a web browser and visit www.artofoffice.com. When the page loads have a look around. Notice that the site is organised into templates for Word, Excel and Powerpoint along the top, as well as by artist, so that having found a template that does the job it’s easier to find others by the same person. Notice too that hovering the mouse pointer over a thumbnail produces a larger pop-up preview.

Let’s have a look at some Word templates. Click the Word link at the top and then find any of the lists and click the BEST 100 link at the top. When we visited there was a wide selection of attractive Word templates that offered something rather different to the somewhat stodgy collection found at www.office.microsoft.com. Here we’ve scrolled down to one called Visiting the Mississippi Country and clicked it. The next page shows reviews, explains which version of Word is required and has a download button. Click that and then choose Save.

Some of the templates include fancy images and are therefore quite large. Once the file is downloaded, open it. The one shown here, for example, is a fancy and colourful document, neatly divided into sections with headings, boxes and an attractive cover page that can be adapted easily by replacing it with original content. Simply double-click on an item to edit it – replace existing text with new text and exchange the pictures here for original ones. Then save and print the document as usual.