I make the monthly newsletter for my gun club. Been doing it since 2012 with Open Office and filing it as .doc and delivering as .pdf with gmail. Fairly simple, but aggravating when formats get all screwed up. I'd like to get a little fancier, but it has to remain simple. My newsletters are usually 7-8 pages.

I think I have reached the limits of Open office (as far as I know). It is getting harder find ways to make the newsletter better.

Looking for suggestions. Does MS Word have better publishing features? Or is there a favorite canned software?

Does your gun club have a website?
Why not just do it all in html and have it posted there? That way you could have archives of past months newsletters available for instant access.

What specifically is the problem?

I know MS Word and there are "templates" available but most of the templates are jerry-rigged, I found. Here's what I mean: I was looking to print a monthly agenda for a group formatted like a booklet form - an 8 1/2" x 11" page folded in half that would read like a book. The templates I found were "fake" in that I can't just write on page 1 and have it flow to what should be the second page. I had to create my own template in terms of orientation, columns, space between the columns, and margins.

Does open office have such templates or that you can create?

Otherwise, you would need a "Publishing" program and not just a document editor like Word. MS Office has Publisher but I'm thinking you can find a simpler and cheaper solution.

I googled microsoft alternatives and this is one of the hits. Scribus which is at the bottom of the list shows up in other lists. I would look into that if I were in your shoes.

If you are looking to step it up, Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Publisher might be worth looking into.

MS Publisher is great for this.
It is a part of MS Office ~ use version 2010 or greater only.

Publisher is easiest for the novice.
If you need more control look elsewhere.

Adobe Pagemaker, indesign etc.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
MS Publisher is great for this.

My wife does our gun club's monthly newsletter, and Publisher is what she uses. She saves it as a .pdf, sends it to the printer, and he prints and mails it. The club's webmaster also posts it on the website.

I've never tried it, but have heard of Lucidpress for a few years. It's offered as a free alternative to MS Pub.

https://www.lucidpress.com/pag...ublisher-alternative

The school my kids go to sends a weekly update and they use a program called MailChimp.

MS Publisher was built for this purpose.

I taught classes in Publisher for adult education a number of years ago. It is exactly what you need.

I'll second Mail Chimp for something that is purely .PDF and email based.

Many use MailChimp, but I prefer to use a website called Vertical Response. It's much easier to use in my opinion. You can send up to 1000 emails per month free. The website has tools that are very easy to use and has statistics for each email you send. My wife and I are missionaries and use this for our monthly newsletter.