by Wordy

Created on: February 12, 2009

The marketing budget for small businesses is often limited and many simply cannot afford to spend big bucks on professional designers and printers. For any business owner in this situation, Microsoft Publisher comes into its own.

Microsoft Publisher is a "desktop publishing", or DTP, package that allows you to create documents, brochures, leaflets, business stationery, postcards, newsletters etc; in fact any type of marketing material. Unlike Microsoft Word, which is a word processing package, Publisher is designed to work with graphics and gives you total freedom on colours, where your graphics (images, logos, boxes, lines etc) are positioned. There are a number of templates included in the software to get you started, or you can design your own document from scratch.

The biggest advantage to a small business of using Microsoft Publisher is one of cost savings. If you are prepared to put a bit of time in yourself, you can design your own marketing material and save the cost of a designer. You also have complete control over your marketing material and, once you're proficient with the software, can produce professional looking documents quickly and easily.

There are three major ways in which Microsoft Publisher can help a small business owner.

1. You can use it to design and print absolutely everything yourself. You can design logos to use in your marketing material and you can print it out yourself using your office printer, fine for small quantities.

2. You can use a professional designer to create your logo, and perhaps even a house-style for you to follow, and you can then use his work to design your own documents, leaflets etc.

3. You can output your Microsoft Publisher files to pdf, jpg, etc, which can be used by commercial printers, so you can do the design work yourself and get the item printed professionally.

Microsoft Publisher has endless uses for small business owners and will prove invaluable. A few words of caution, however. Getting to know how to use the software to its full potential takes time. You can learn as you go along if you wish, although this takes time, or take a class. You also need to consider your talent as a designer before you start; if design isn't your forte, then it is worth investing in a professional to provide some style guidelines for you to follow, so that you don't have to worry about the original creative work.

Once you get started with Microsoft Publisher you will find more and more ways in which it can help save cost and improve the presentation of your company's documents

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