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The Organized Wedding Consultant Online Help: Working with Stationery

Views discussed: Wording, Appearance

Even if your clients are going to have their invitations professionally printed, not run them off on a personal computer, this section of the program can still be very useful:

• The most powerful aspect of the "Stationery" section of the software is not its ability to print things out but its ability to suggest correct, formal wording for almost any situation, instantly.Even if your clients are going to have their invitations engraved, it may still be useful to determine the formal wording that's appropriate for their situation. (Like wedding invitations issued by the bride's stepmother to a Jewish wedding to be held outdoors, at the residence of a friend, at 8:45 in the evening, with the reception at the same location afterwards. Think what it would be like to piece together the wording for that invitation from etiquette books.)
• There are lots of pieces of formal correspondence that the software can handle besides wedding invitations. You won't run into some of these types of stationery every day, and having the program quickly produce the right wording is handy if it's not familiar to you.
• If your client is planning additional events besides the wedding and reception, then a lower level of formality may be possible for those invitations, and printing them yourself could be an option.
• There are some sorts of formal correspondence for which the need can arise very quickly: postponement of the wedding to a new date, indefinite postponement due to illness, and cancellation of the wedding. If any of these circumstances arise, the combined wording and printing abilities of the software give you a way to handle the situation quickly, even if there isn't time to use a professional printer.

Wording

The place to start with stationery is "Wording", under "Stationery" in the left-hand menu. The first thing to know about this view is that it isn't intended to help you make pretty invitations -- that's the job of the next view, "Appearance." The function of "Wording" is to help you design the correct wording for whatever kind of formal correspondence you're working on.

The second thing to know is that this view is not limited to invitations alone. If you click the box in the top-left corner of the view -- it probably says "Invitation to Wedding" -- you'll see that there's a whole list of formal correspondence that the software can help with, from wedding invitations to announcements to save-the-dates to invitations to a bridal tea, and on and on. All you have to do is choose the kind of stationery you'd like to work with, and all of the various boxes and labels in the window will adjust themselves to show appropriate options.

Once you've selected the kind of stationery you'd like to work on, set the various options on the left-hand side of the view to match the circumstances you're dealing with. The suggested text on the right-hand side will automatically change to reflect the conditions you've selected.

Make sure you notice the buttons near the top of the view, labeled "Change Relationship" and "Select Names". These buttons are how you specify who is issuing the invitations, so they're important. If the wording that's displayed doesn't reflect who should be issuing the invitations, click these buttons to select the correct relationship and issuers. (The issuers must be in the address book in order for you to select them. See the separate help article "Working with the Address Book".)

Once you have the wording set to reflect the circumstances, you can start changing the wording to suit you: just check the box labeled "Let me change the wording", directly above the big white area on the right-hand side of the view. Then you can type whatever you'd like.

One thing to watch out for is changes to the schedule of events. The wording you start with reflects the time and date you entered when you first added the client, but any changes you make to the schedule after that time won't be reflected automatically in the wording of formal stationery. So if you change the schedule -- or the location -- of the events, you need to come back to "Wording" and change it here as well.

Appearance

If all you need is the wording (to give to a professional printer), then once you've finished perfecting your wording, you're done. If, however, you're going to print out the invitations (or other formal correspondence) yourself, you'll want to use the "Appearance" view as well (It's next under "Wording" in the left-hand menu). This view gives you control over the basic elements you need for printing nice-looking invitations: the font, the size of the piece of paper, how to handle Roman numerals (Roman numerals look silly in many of the fonts that are used for wedding invitations), etc. This view gives you a fast and simple way to produce attractive results. If you're skilled with a full-featured word-processing program like WordPerfect or Word, however, these programs will give you more control over the appearance and layout of the finished product. The software does a great job planning weddings, but it doesn't try to be a full-featured desktop publishing program like PhotoShop.