When I was in 6th standard, two of my friends and I decided to bring out a newsletter. We tore a few sheets of paper from a long notebook, wrote some hasty articles, drew a few sketches and then pinned the sheets together haphazardly with a few pins. We then decided to distribute it. For some reason, we wanted it to be anonymous.

During lunch time, my friends and I dropped the paper on desks when no one was looking. Everyone was surprised. Who had brought out this newspaper? (If they had paid more attention to the handwriting, they would have been able to pinpoint the culprits, but for some reason, no one knew it was us) We stopped ‘circulation’ after the second attempt. We didn’t have any new articles, it was tedious to write them down anyway, and we were running out of sheets.

If we had a computer back then, probably our newsletter might have thrived a little longer. The computer and the internet sure make life easy!

Getting Started

Log on to www.office.microsoft. com and download a cool newsletter template. Having a template makes life easier when you want to bring out a newsletter. All you have to do is to download the template, and save the document with the name you prefer. Just make sure that you have saved the doc as a word file.

Most importantly, make sure you are downloading a template that works in MS Word. If you download a template that doesn’t, then you will not be able to open it and use it.

Open the file and start typing in the relevant boxes. The layout is already done. You can change things if you don’t like the layout. You can move about the text boxes etc. Just make sure, they are all aligned to each other.

The newsletter template comes with a few designs and pictures already. You can insert pictures of your own choice if you like, if they are relevant to your article.

The Articles

Writing the articles can be a lot of fun. First, you have to decide who is going to read your newsletter? Is it just for a few friends? For your entire class? What about your class teacher? Then, you will have to make sure you use appropriate language.

Here are a few ideas for possible articles that you can write:

Has something interesting happened to a friend of yours? Did her dog just give birth to a whole lot of puppies? Take pictures and put them up with a small article about the puppies.

Maybe your friend would like to give some of them away and this would be a great idea to let people know.

What has been the latest buzz in school? Is everyone excited about the graduation ceremony coming up? You could also write a personal piece on what graduation means to you.

How about selecting a random person in your class or group and conducting his/her interview? Who knows, maybe they might reveal a completely different facet to you.

Jokes, riddles, puzzles, these are great space-fillers when you have space but not enough for a full-fledged article.

If you have an artist among your group of friends, or someone who can draw reasonably well, make them draw something, get it scanned at a Cyber center, or at home, if you have a printer/scanner and paste the file at an appropriate place in your newsletter.

Protecting your Document

The template is ready and so are the articles. Now you need to take care of the circulation. Once again, this depends on how many people you will be distributing your newsletter to, and the size of your newsletter.

You might want to take print outs and distribute them, but I would strongly advise you to go paperless in this age where everyone is doing their bit to save the environment.

Circulate the document as an email attachment. If you feel that someone might make changes to your newsletter, then what you can do, is password protect your document.

By doing this, you ensure that only those people who know the password (such as yourself) can make changes to the newsletter. To do this, you have to follow these steps.

Open the newsletter document. Click Tools. Select Protect Document from the list. On the right-hand side, a pane open opens up.

Select the check box next to ‘Allow only this type of editing in the document’ and select No Changes (Read only) from the list.

Click on Yes, Start Enforcing Protection at the bottom of the pane.

A small dialoge box opens up, asking you to enter a password. Enter a password that you will not forget easily and click OK.

Now, even you will not be able to make changes to the document. You can now circulate the newsletter and have no fear that anyone else will make changes to your articles. However, if you want to remove this option, it’s quite easy to do so.

Just click on Stop Protection at the bottom of the pane. You will be asked to enter your password. Enter it and you can start editing it again. If you have any doubts or queries, feel free to email me at andaleeb.w@gmail.com