The Mac Lawyer : Ben Stevens : Using Macs In The Practice Of Law

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If you're like me, you regularly create a large number of letters to be faxed each week. Our firm's letterhead is professionally printed, with two green colors. It is not terribly expensive, but it is not cheap either. I found a way to easily create what I called "fax letterhead", which can be used for faxes so as not to waste our regular, printed letterhead. In this post, will show you how I create this fax letterhead and reduce our operating expenses. Of course, the best part is that this process is quick and easy, and the recipient never knows the difference.

1. Scan your existing letterhead. The scan should be of a fairly high quality, but it does not have to be super quality.
2. Save the scanned letterhead in a picture format. I saved mine as a *.jpg file, but other formats, such as *.gif, *.tiff, *.jpeg, etc. will work equally well.
3. Create your Word document as you normally would.
4. From the Menu at top, select "Insert > Watermark..."
5. In the "Insert Watermark" box that appears, click the button beside "Picture" to select that option
6. Then click "Select Picture"
7. Browse to where you saved your scanned letterhead picture file, click on the file name, then click the "Insert" button
8. In the "Insert Watermark" box, check the "Washout" to de-select that option
9. In the "Scale" box, type 100
10. Click the "OK" button.

Once you have completed these steps, your scanned letterhead should appear as a background on your document and look slightly grayed out or faded. When you print your document, it will print out normally and not appear faded. Hopefully, you will find this process helpful and it will make you more efficient and cost-effective. If you have any suggestions, tips, or thoughts please feel free to submit a comment.