Unless you’re a professional designer, odds are very good that your workstation doesn’t have industry-standard design software like Adobe Photoshop and InDesign installed. However, you almost certainly have some version of Microsoft Word.
I won’t pretend that Word comes close to offering the quality and flexibility that professional design tools do. There’s simply no comparison. But with a little effort, it IS possible to create attractive and professional-looking flyers, newsletters, etc.
Microsoft Word is a good (if overly-complicated) word processor. And as I demonstrate here, it can sometimes even substitute for a professional design tool if you know a few tricks. But it should never, EVER be used for web design.
Never.
Really.
If you want to make a web designer cry, tell him/her that you built a website using Word’s Save as HTML feature.
If you’ve worked with Powerpoint or Word much, you’ve probably discovered that adding lots of photos can result in a huge file that’s difficult to email or post online. This usually happens when large or high-resolution photos are dropped in and then scaled down. It also happens when the Crop tool is used to crop out large areas of a photo.
You can fix this problem by compressing your images.