Create and apply master pages

- When working with publications here in Publisher, especially those with multiple pages, if you ever find yourself adding elements to a page, and then going to another page and realizing you want those same elements there, and maybe even on all the pages in your publication, it can be a tedious and repetitive process. A better option is to use a shortcut we're going to explore in this movie. It's called the master pages. And we're going to do it with our HP brochure publication 0601, if you're catching up. We're on page two. Let's say, for example, using this three-panel template, we want to put a physical vertical line in between the panels. That'll add a nice touch. And then we'd have to go to the next page and repeat the process if we wanted it to be consistent. Instead, we can add it to the master page, and then have the master page apply to any or all of our pages. To access master pages, we go up here to Page Design, way over here to the right, you'll see Master Pages. It's a drop-down, give it a click. And you'll see we get a default master page, labeled Master Page A. We have the opportunity here to choose None, and not use any master pages on the page we're looking at in our publication. And we can add additional master pages if we want to as well. They'll automatically be labeled Master Page B, C, D, etc. How do we do that? We go down to Edit Master Pages. Ctrl+M is your keyboard shortcut to switch over to the master page view. Check out the ribbon. We're on the Master Page tab that has appeared. And as you can see, the template, which is our three-panel brochure, has no content. Anything we add here can appear on every page in our publication. We only have to add it once to the master though. So let's say we did want those vertical lines. Well, we'd go to the Insert tab. We'll go down to Shapes. We'll choose the straight line. That's the first line here in the Lines group. Go ahead. Now we simply draw it. I'm going to start near the top in between panels one and two. Hold down the Shift key if you want to keep it perfectly straight and vertical. And as we get close to the bottom, I'll release the mouse first, and then my Shift key. Notice the line is still selected, so we can do things like change its color. Let's go to Shape Outline, and choose a nice dark green that matches our publication, like Accent 3 or maybe even Accent 3 the RGB color you can see Darker 50%. I'm going to go with that one. Now we want one over here as well, but since this is already created and still selected, we can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C to copy it, Ctrl+V to paste the copy, and now just simply click and drag to move it over. We'll go in between and then we'll move it up and down until we see those alignment guides appear to tell us that they're perfectly aligned. And release. There we go. Click in the background. We've now made changes to our master. Now if we want, we can use this master on any or all of the pages in our publication. We can apply them from here. You'll see an Apply To drop-down. We can apply to all pages or just the current page. But let's close master page here by clicking on the close button, which takes us back now to our publication, and check it out, it's automatically applied to our master, and in the background we see that here in our publication. Now if we go back to Page Design, and over to Master Pages, you can see Master Page A is what's being used by default. And that's why we see those lines. Now if we didn't want them, let's say, on the inside, we could go to page two if you're not already there, go to the Master Pages drop-down, and choose None. Notice those lines disappear. But if we go back to page one, they are still there. But if we want them on page two, we go back there to Master Pages, and choose Master Page A. Let's go back up to Master Pages now, and go down to Edit Master Pages, because you'll notice there's also the ability to add a master page. Go ahead and click Add Master Page. It's automatically ID-ed as master page B. We can change the description. How about three-panel alternate as the description? And click OK. Now you can see what that looks like. It's just a plain old page. Anything we do here can be applied to any of the pages in our brochure. For example, this was the outside pages, we could do something like a border around the outside. That would mean going to Insert, back to Shapes, choosing the rectangle, for example. I'm going to go just outside the margins so I know that I'm not going to effect any of the content that might appear in my publication already or anything that will be added inside the margins. And I'll choose a different outline. I'll go to this colored outline, Accent 1. You can see what that looks like. Let's see what that checks out like by going back to the master page, and we'll close our master page, and now let's go to page one, and change from Master Page A to B by going to Page Design up here at the top, to Master Pages, we'll choose this three-panel alternate. You can see we get the border all the way around the outside. Cool stuff. You can see, when you're working with publications, especially publications with multiple pages, think of the newsletter that might have many pages. Anything that needs to appear on more than one page can be added to a master, and you simply apply the master to your publication to save you a lot of time and a lot of effort.