Letterhead, Autotext & Goofy Formatting

Q: I use Word 97 for letterhead, as opposed to having letterhead pre-printed. At the top, and centered is the name of my business. Next I have two columns, stread very far apart, with names of employees on the left, and phone numbers on the right. Then, back to a regular letter (i.e., no columns). Several years ago I tried to put my Letterhead in autotext making the creation of a new letter easier. It did seem to matter "how much", as far as paragraph marks were concerned, I included in my autotext: it would always come out with either a page break after the column section, or a column break after the between the first and second column. Now I have moved offices and sure wish

A: There is probably a correct (i.e., successful) way to do this with AutoText, but I think you would find it much more satisfactory to do this with a template. Put your letterhead in the document header (you'll probably want to choose "Different first page" on the Layout tab of Page Setup so that you can have a different header for letters that run to a second page), and save the document as a template. then whenever you want to write a letter, create a new document based on this template. This also allows you to insert a CreateDate field in the template so that the current date is inserted in every new letter you create. When your staff changes, you can edit the template more easily than AutoText, too. Note that you don't have to change the top margin to accommodate a deep header; it will push the

text down as far as needed without affecting the margin on successive pages (you'll probably also want to include some "Space after" in the last paragraph to make some room between the letterhead and your letter body). Also note that you won't be able to use newspaper-style columns in a header, which would require a section break, but you can achieve the effect you want, I believe, with a left-aligned paragraph and a right tab at the right margin (or possibly left and right tabs), and you can certainly do it with an unbordered two column table. If you need more information on creating and saving a template, look in Word's online Help file under "templates, creating."