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It's actually quite easy to create professional looking documents using Microsoft Word, even documents destined for commercial publication in print or on the web. Here are some tips to take that bland-but-necessary information sitting in a block of text in front of you and turn it into a stunning, artistic, professional brochure, newsletter, executive proposal or any other high-end business publication.

Let's start with the basics. All the formatting in the world won't mask a lousy report, so if your source data is sloppy, confusing or incomplete don't try to do anything else until you've fixed it. This can be as simple as rewriting sentences, fixing syntactical errors or chasing down that pesky secretary in accounting who keeps forgetting to e-mail you those figures.

Or you might have to do some external research, either online or off to gather more information, and perhaps even make some decisions about what material the final publication should and should not contain. Do you need to provide some context to explain a potentially confusing point? How about an overview of the actions of your competition on a similar matter? Will a funny cartoon help lighten the tone or will it get you fired?

Source material matters. It's not the most fun part, but it is the most important. Do your homework first, then you can have some fun putting it all together.

Quite often the best place to start and finish your quest to create a professional looking document is the template gallery at Microsoft. You'll find a large selection of templates for all Microsoft Office Programs that can be used in a wide variety of publications, from newsletters to brochures to event tickets. These templates are free to use and you can tweak them to suit your company's look and feel.

Whether using a template or not you'll want to adhere to your company's graphic standards guide. This guide will include the company's logo in all of its acceptable forms, as well as any directions for how and where it should be placed in a publication, and the size it should be. Even if you don't necessarily agree with your company's graphic standards you will still have to follow them, as anything that differs from your carefully-crafted brand image will scream unprofessional to your superiors.

If you have tabular data to include, be sure to use a table that is clean and easy to read, with no data squashed into super-thin columns. Experiment with line and border styles to create a variation on the standard black

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