Creating and Editing Letters

Previous versions of Word included a feature called the Letter Wizard, which offered a seemingly simple way to build a simple letter by filling in a series of dialog boxes. The Letter Wizard was a fine idea, terribly executed, and we’re delighted to report that it is completely gone in Word 2007. If you want to write a letter to a single recipient, you can use any of the following options:

• Write it from scratch. This is the most labor-intensive option, suitable only if you want absolute control over the look and feel of your letter. You have to apply formatting manually or build your own styles (do yourself a favor and save the formatted letter as a template so that you can reuse it later).

• Use a ready-made template from the Office Online collection. You’ll find literally hundreds of options, neatly categorized and searchable, with canned text that you can adapt to your own purposes. These downloadable documents use a few simple techniques to help you fill in essential data fields. In this section, we explain how to work around the limitations and gotchas of these templates.

• Use one of the new Word 2007 letter templates to build letters from scratch. These templates use a Word 2007 feature called content controls to add date pickers, fill-in text boxes, and custom drop-down lists to help you assemble a great-looking letter with minimal effort. We show you how to customize one of these templates (or build your own from scratch).