topHOME All Pages Computer Help Family Pages Story List Making Pictures
Here’s a printable version with smaller pictures.
On this page:
A Warning about “Free” Stationery An Exception—Free without hassles Making stationery the easy way Finding a file in a crowded box Adding pictures to your stationery Using unusual fonts Links to stationery lessons Too Big for Every Day UseIf you don’t have a handy shortcut to your
stationery folder, it’s a very good idea to make one, as the path
you must “drill down” (navigate) to reach it is a long one.
It is My Computer\C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Stationery.
Shortcuts to your most frequently visited folders can be put
together in a single folder on your desktop. Then you only have to
open that folder to quickly have access to any one of them—in
this case, Stationery.
The first picture in the directory will have
been automatically selected. Hit the “Browse” button. With any luck
you’ll find yourself in the stationery folder. If this is not
so, navigate to it.
Scroll along until you locate the picture that you like. If there
are lots of files in the folder, you can more easily locate the one
you want by the following method.
Put your cursor on any file. Key in the first letter of the name of the file you want. That will take you to the first file beginning with that letter.
Double click the file you want, or click it once
and click “Open”.
If the picture is a background, choose “Entire Page” from the
drop-down beside the slot that has “Do Not Tile” in it.
If the picture is not a background, choose where you want to place
it and leave “Do not Tile” as it is. Top left is probably the best
place to put it.
If the picture is a background, choose a colour that’s very much like it. That is, if you have chosen dark blue background tiles, click on the dark blue or the navy colour swatch in the drop-down list box. This is important, because someimes pictures get lost in transit. You’ll probably choose a light, bright colour for your text, and if your dark blue tile is lost your recipient will be left with white or aqua text on a white background and the contents of your email will be forever a mystery.
If the picture is NOT a background, you can try choosing a colour,
but they’re not very nice.
In the next box you’re invited to choose a font. The problem
is, if your recipient doesn’t have the font you choose, it
will be rendered as, for instance, Arial or Times Roman. You have
no control over this, as it depends on the settings in the other
person’s PC. Therefore, it’s better to choose a very ordinary
font, so that you can be sure that your recipient does have it.
Choose a size and colour for your font and click “Next”.
Here’s a demonstration of how fonts may appear on a different computer.
If the picture is a background, do nothing about the margins. If
it is not a background, experiment with the settings until
you’re satisfied.
Here’s a tip, though. If you make a wide margin to keep the
text away from the picture, the margin will persist below the
picture. If you forget about inserting a picture now and insert it
later, when you’re writing a
letter, you can make the text flow around it. It means you have to
put the picture in each time, but it does look nicer.
You can, of course, add further pictures while writing your letter
on the newly created stationery.
Click “Next” and make up a name.
If you’re not sure that you’re going to like the
stationery you’ve just made, start the name with “1” or “z”. Then
it will be much easier to find and delete. You’d be amazed
how much junk you can accumulate while you’re trying things
out.
Click “Next” and you’ll be back to the “Select Stationery”
box. If you click OK you’ll be presented with your new
stationery, ready to write your letter.
Although you have nominated text size and colour and a font, you
can still make changes to these while you are writing your letter.
To change the default is sometimes tricky. You can’t turn
your marks on as you can in Word, so it’s easier to change
things once the words are on the page, rather than before you start
writing.
If you paste some text from the clipboard, it will keep its
original formatting. Of course you can make the usual
changes—change font and font size, underline, embolden,
italicise and colour.
If you have just created a piece of stationery, OR if you have just clicked “New Mail”, clicking the “Insert” item on the menu bar will do no good, as all commands except “File Attachment” are dimmed. You must first click in the writing space. Then click “Insert” and choose “Picture”.
In this box, first hit the “Browse” button. Hopefully, it’ll take you to where your picture is. If it doesn’t, navigate until you find the folder you saved it in. If you always put all of the pictures you intend to use for stationery into your stationery folder or one of its subfolders (if you have subfolders), I think that you’ll always be taken to that folder. Otherwise, it’ll probably take you where you went last time. In that case, navigate to the place where you know that your picture is located.
When you find the picture you want, either double click it or click it once and click “Open”. An annoying thing is that this browse box doesn’t give you a preview. You just have to hope that you remember the name of the picture.
Now, this is important. When you get back to this box, where the file name of your chosen picture will have been filled in, you need to change a few things.
Alternate text doesn’t absolutely have to
to be filled in. It’s something to be there instead of a red
“x” if your picture gets lost. It’s good practice, and you
would always do it if you were making a web page. A picture put in
from here isn’t likely to get lost, but write a brief
description of the picture, eg “kittens chasing butterfly,” just in
case.
Now, if you leave Alignment as “Baseline”,
you’ll have a blank margin all the way across the top of your
page. That’s not as bad as the left margin you get when you
put the picture in from “Create Stationery”, but it’s still
not wonderful. If, however, you change Alignment to “Left”, the
text will flow around your picture. Put anything from 4 to 10 in
the Horizontal Spacing place. You’ll decide what’s best
after you’ve done it a few times. You don’t usually need to
put anything into the Vertical Spacing box. The Border Thickness
needs to be used only if you want a black border around the
picture.
Click OK when you’ve done all that. Then you can use the stationery, but only once. So far, when I’ve tried to “Save as Stationery”, only the background has been saved. A picture added in this way is part of the letter, not of the stationery. You can make it permanent by writing the stationery in Notepad, Notetab, or any other plain text editor. Find how to do this—it’s easier than you think—by trying some of the lessons shown on the Making Pictures page.
top Go back to Creating Stationery
If you want to see what stationery looks like in a text editor, go into Outlook Express when you aren’t on line and close the error box that comes up. Find an old letter on interesting stationery, highlight it, hold the Ctrl key down and press F2. When you’ve finished looking close the window.
What you see there is a bit more
complicated than something you’d write yourself, because Outlook puts in
some bits—especially the very long numbers that you may
see.
When you’ve used “Create Stationery” at any time, you can
look at the source and see how Outlook recorded your
commands.
The basics of making stationery can be found through the Making Pictures page. You’ll find step by step instructions for making seamless tiles, with lots of finished examples. There are also two scripts to copy and paste—one very straight-forward, the second more complex. You’ll find links to downloads of free graphics software and, just to get you started, there’s a detailed tutorial on getting the best from the Windows “Paint” program.
To see instructions for more advanced—and quite beautiful—stationery, go to Creatively Designed. Although the page is entitled “OE6 tutorial”, the instructions work perfectly well for earlier versions. Without help from the author of this page my own second script just wouldn’t work, so I recommend that you take a long look.
There are other sites with helpful tutorials. Some concentrate on graphics and are worth visiting even if just to admire. Some others, unfortunately, have pop-up advertising.
To find these sites yourself, type Outlook Express stationery into Google.
If you find a site that offers free complete stationery to download, take care. Stationery consists of an html file, a picture or pictures (gif or jpg) and sometimes a sound file (usually mid). The best site I've seen offers the script to copy and paste and reminds you to find your own pictures.
Stationery does not need to be installed. Stationery does not need an exe file. If a free stationery site offers its stationery as an exe file, then there's something you're not being told. The exe does put the files mentioned above into your stationery folder, but too often it also installs something extra—spyware. You can read about spyware here. There being more sites on the web than I'll ever visit, I can't say that this is always true, but I can see no other reason for that exe, and where I've checked it is true.
I've found an exception to this rule. Traci and Murphy (that's Murphy on the right) have a great site with lots of give-away stationery in zip format. Lots of pretty backgrounds and happy-making pictures. Much of the stationery includes background sound. While background sound may not be everyone's cup of tea, it's easy enough to snip out the line referring to it, and if you're one of those people who've been finding that OE no longer embeds sounds correctly, you'll be delighted.
When I congratulated Traci and Murphy on the site, Traci replied “Our site has no spyware, cookies, or ads and I want to keep it that way”. So far, this is the only problem-free site of its kind that I've found.
Another good thing—if Traci has reason to send an email to more than one person, she uses the bcc rather than the cc line in Outlook Express, so you don't have to worry about your address being sent to all of her recipients. That's a bonus, definitely!
Apart from the risk of spyware, consider. The very large—and therefore slow to upload and download—artistic stationery is only suitable for use within a group of people who exchange complex stationery. There are plenty of such groups. They're very active and they like to show their own best efforts. They're often associated with one or more sites that show you how to make those lovely backgrounds or how to introduce special effects, such as scrolling. Type PSP Stationery into Google and you'll find such lessons, or start with the excellent site I've recommended in the paragraph above.
Graphic intensive stationery isn't suitable for every day use. It can even make some recipients feel annoyed. A small tiled background that you designed yourself doesn't add much to the size of an email and makes it personal. A family photograph has a real purpose and is usually much appreciated. Big stationery, though, needs to be sent only to those who you know like to receive it.
Within stationery groups, people are looking for and showing off original work. Downloaded complete stationery doesn't belong. Really, lovely as it may seem, that stuff doesn't belong anywhere!
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