After recently trying to reformat a family member's text document, I felt an uncontrollable urge to preach about the benefits of using paragraph styles. Before you go "yuck, that sounds like work" and quickly click elsewhere, let me tell you this: The main benefit of using styles is in preventing screaming nervous breakdowns. And I have the experience to back this up.

After learning the basics of TextMaker templates and the mysteries of master pages in part 1 of this tutorial, it's now time to take things a bit further.

To illustrate the possibilities, we will create a letter template with a second column which contains a logo, page numbers and a fixed background image (a watermark).

To follow this tutorial closely, you can click here to download all the images used in this project.

When you create documents with a word processor, you will quickly notice that many of them are quite similar. Letters tend to have the same layout, so do invoices, meeting notices, etc.

Some TextMaker users start every letter from scratch, others use the predefined templates. Adventurous users open an old document, delete the text and enter new text, then save the new document under a new file name. This is risky: All too often, they forget to pick a new name and accidentally overwrite an old document.

A better approach is to set up a custom document layout and save it as a re-usable document template. This is not as scary as it may sound – let's work through the process one step at a time.

Dear SoftMaker customers:

In the second part of our "Tips and tricks" series, Klaus Bailly, our guest author and a SoftMaker volunteer, explains how you can print out a multi-page TextMaker document in the form of a booklet: namely by fitting two regular pages each on each side of an A4 or Letter sheet. The objective is to receive a stack of printed pages, which can be made into a booklet by simply folding them in the middle.